
Jenny Turner novel, The Brainstorm, is out in paperback.
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Vol. 13 No. 12 · 27 June 1991
pages 20-22 | 3105 words

Scottish Men and Scottish Women
Jenny Turner
- The Burn by James Kelman
Secker, 244 pp, £13.99, April 1991, ISBN 0 436 23286 3
- Blood by Janice Galloway
Secker, 179 pp, £12.99, March 1991, ISBN 0 436 20027 9
James Kelman was born in Glasgow in 1946. After spells in the US as a teenager, London as a young adult, he returned to Glasgow, where he now lives and works. Janice Galloway was born in Ayrshire in 1956. She worked in Ayrshire as a schoolteacher until recently, when she started making enough money from her writing to give up teaching and move to Glasgow. Kelman spotted Galloway’s first completed story, ‘It was’, in 1985, and encouraged her to submit it to Edinburgh Review, the quarterly magazine which publishes work-in-progress from Kelman and other Scottish writers. Galloway went on, as Kelman had before her, to publish her first big book, the 1990 novel The trick is to keep breathing, with Polygon, the small publisher of which Edinburgh Review is a part.
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Letters
Vol. 13 No. 17 · 12 September 1991
From Roy MacGregor-Hastie
My father used to say: ‘A Highland gentleman is the noblest creature to survive in God’s imperfect creation.’ It came as a great shock to me to discover that this opinion is not widely shared, even in the Lowlands. I got over the shock in the end, but I would not like to be associated with such people as James Kelman and Janice Galloway, so I was rather put off by your headline ‘Scottish Men and Women’ over a review of their outpourings (LRB 27 June). I do not mind feeling guilty – that is half the joy of being a Catholic – but I do not like to feel guilty by association. Most Highland Scottish writers, as ever, live outside the United Kingdom. As many of us are academics as well, we would never praise, as Jenny Turner did, a phrase like: ‘Fucking, bogging mud man a swamp’. It sounds like a bit of your Poet in Residence, Fiona (where did she get that name from?). Lang may the lums of Edinburgh reek as copies of the Edinburgh Review burn in the grates of advocates.
Roy MacGregor-Hastie
Osaka Gakuin University, Japan