page_title: Novel in Scotland
section_title: Late twentieth century to the present
hierarchical_section_title: Novel in Scotland / Late twentieth century to the present
caption_attribution_description: Ian Rankin with Exit Music
context_page_description: The novel in Scotland includes all long prose fiction published in Scotland and by Scottish authors since the development of the literary format in the eighteenth century. The novel was soon a major element of Scottish literary and critical life. Tobias Smollett's picaresque novels, such as The Adventures of Roderick Random and The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle mean that he is often seen as Scotland's first novelist. Other Scots who contributed to the development of the novel in the eighteenth century include Henry Mackenzie and John Moore.
  There was a tradition of moral and domestic fiction in the early nineteenth century that included the work of Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Brunton and Christian Johnstone. The outstanding literary figure of the early nineteenth century was Walter Scott, whose Waverley is often called the first historical novel. He had a major worldwide influence. His success led to a publishing boom in Scotland. Major figures that benefited included James Hogg, John Galt, John Gibson Lockhart, John Wilson and Susan Ferrier.
context_section_description: World War II had a greater impact on the novel than in poetry. It ended the careers of some novelists and delayed the start of others. Many major Scottish post-war novelists, such as Robin Jenkins (1912–2005), Jessie Kesson (1916–94), Muriel Spark (1918–2006), Alexander Trocchi (1925–84) and James Kennaway (1928–68) spent much or most of their lives outside Scotland, but often dealt with Scottish themes. Jenkins major novels such as The Cone Gatherers (1955), The Changeling (1958) and Fergus Lamont (1978) focused on working-class dilemmas in a world without spiritual consolation. Very different in tone, Spark produced novels that explored modern social life as in her only two overtly Scottish novels The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) and the Edinburgh-set The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). Successful mass-market works included the action novels of Alistair MacLean (1922–87), and the historical fiction of Dorothy Dunnett (b. 1923). A younger generation of novelists that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s included Allan Massie (b. 1938), Shena Mackay (b. 1944) and Alan Spence (b. 1947). Massie's work often deals with historical themes while aware of the limitations of historical objectivity, as in his Augustus (1986), Tiberius (1991) and The Ragged Lion (1994). Working class identity continued to be a major theme in the post-war novel and can be seen in Archie Hind's (1928–2008) The Dear Green Place (1966), Alan Sharp's (1934–2013) A Green Tree in Gedde (1965), George Friel's (1910–75) Mr Alfred M.A. (1972) and William McIlvanney's (b. 1936) Docherty (1975).
  From the 1980s Scottish literature enjoyed another major revival, particularly associated with a group of Glasgow writers focused around meetings in the house of critic, poet and teacher Philip Hobsbaum (1932–2005). Also important in the movement was Peter Kravitz, editor of Polygon Books. These included Alasdair Gray (b. 1934), whose epic Lanark (1981) built on the working class novel to explore realistic and fantastic narratives. James Kelman’s (b. 1946) The Busconductor Hines (1984) and A Disaffection (1989) were among the first novels to fully utilise a working class Scots voice as the main narrator. In the 1990s major, prize winning, Scottish novels that emerged from this movement included Gray's Poor Things (1992), which investigated the capitalist and imperial origins of Scotland in an inverted version of the Frankenstein myth, Irvine Welsh's (b. 1958), Trainspotting (1993), which dealt with the drug addiction in contemporary Edinburgh, Alan Warner’s (b. 1964) Morvern Callar (1995), dealing with death and authorship and Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late (1994), a stream of consciousness novel dealing with a life of petty crime. These works were linked by a reaction to Thatcherism, that was sometimes overtly political, and explored marginal areas of experience using vivid vernacular language (including expletives and Scots dialect).
  
  Other notable authors to gain prominence in this period included Janice Galloway (b. 1956) with work such as The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989) and Foreign Parts (1994); A. L. Kennedy (b. 1965) with Looking for the Possible Dance (1993) and So I Am Glad (1995); Iain Banks (1954–2013) with The Crow Road (1992) and Complicity (1993); Candia McWilliam (b, 1955) with Debatable land (1994); Frank Kuppner (b. 1951) with Something Very Like Murder (1994); and Andrew O'Hagan (b. 1968) with Our Fathers (1999). In genre fiction Iain Banks, writing as Iain M. Banks, produced ground-breaking science fiction. Scottish crime fiction, known as Tartan Noir, has been a major area of growth with the success of novelists including Frederic Lindsay (1933–2013), Quintin Jardine (b. 1945), Val McDermid (b. 1955), Denise Mina (b. 1966), Christopher Brookmyre (b. 1968), and particularly the success of Edinburgh's Ian Rankin (b. 1960) and his Inspector Rebus novels. The most successful author of Scottish origins in recent years has been J. K. Rowling (b. 1965), author of the Harry Potter children's fantasy novels.
caption: Ian Rankin with the final volume in his Inspector Rebus series in 2007
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