Reviews & features: Books, Doug Johnstone

Robert MacFarlane at Edinburgh Book Festival with The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

Finding a calling in nature writing

A new generation of authors is bringing an incredible range of skills to nature writing: literary style, social observation, memoir, geology, cartography and psychology amongst them. All of which can be found in Robert Macfarlane’s remarkable third…

Authors exploring nature writing at the 2012 Edinburgh Book Festival

Jean Sprackland, Robert Macfarlane and Kathleen Jamie go outside

There has been a genuine resurgence of interest in the field of nature writing over the last decade. Allied to an increase in the number of related programmes on television, the publishing world has really embraced this renaissance, with a wider range…

Interview - Alan Bissett

Writer tackles Scotland’s sectarian shame in fourth novel Pack Men

With the rivalry between the Old Firm reaching dangerously manic levels recently, you’d think that sectarianism would be reflected in our nation’s fiction, but it’s hard to think of many novels that examine our unique bigotry. Step forward Alan Bissett…

Jackie Kay: Finding Family

Red Dust Road is a remarkable account full of passion and humour

The ideas of belonging and identity are at the very core of what it means to be human, but those themes become much more complex when the person in question is adopted. The adopted person’s search for their biological parents is a familiar narrative…

Chika Unigwe

Learning how much shame there is in luxury

The depiction of prostitutes in fiction can be a one-dimensional affair, but not in Chika Unigwe’s poignant and moving novel On Black Sisters’ Street. Unigwe was raised in Nigeria, but has spent the last decade in Belgium, and it was a culture shock…

James Kelman

Striking deep into the Scottish soul

There can be few Scottish writers as lauded as James Kelman, and rightly so. The Glasgow-born author has spent a career carving out a place as the authentic voice of his generation, his use of stream-of-consciousness prose and vernacular Scots…

Festival Books - Rosemary Goring

The history woman

Rosemary Goring tells Doug Johnstone about finding the voices or ordinary people. There’s been a resurgence of interest in Scottish history among ordinary punters, a trend Scotland: The Autobiography taps into brilliantly. Edited by Rosemary Goring, a…

Chuck Palahniuk - Snuff love

Chuck Palahniuk tells such stark tales that people faint at his readings. Doug Johnstone crosses his legs, girds his loins and chats to the guru of gore

Kapka Kassabova

Travel memoir about Bulgaria from Edinburgh-based scribe

Kapka Kassabova likes to travel. You can tell, because the writer’s accent is all over the place: there’s Eastern European, Antipodean and a hint of Scottish in there as she chats away. Kassabova was raised in Bulgaria before living in New Zealand for…

James Meek

Johnny Depp-friendly author and journo

As well as writing novels, James Meek has spent a lot of time as a journalist reporting from conflict zones, and this experience fed into his latest fictional work, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent. A global book, it ranges from London to rural America…

Craig Davidson

Craig Davidson doesn’t pull any punches. We might as well get the terrible boxing pun out the way at the start, because his debut novel, The Fighter, is a brutally violent but brilliantly written tale set in the world of underground bare-knuckle…

Billy Brag

Billy Bragg was described by The Times as ‘a national treasure’. That particular phrase would surely bring a wry smile to his face, not least because the topic currently vexing the lifelong political campaigner and singer-songwriter is the fundamental…

Katrin Himmler

Katrin Himmler was born into a family with a dark history, but has only now been able to write about it. She tells Doug Johnstone about reliving the past

Iain Banks

Getting climate change into a family saga

Iain Banks can probably be accused of many things, but lack of imagination isn’t one of them. While most of his outlandish ideas get channelled into his sci-fi work, there’s still plenty of inventive stuff to be found in his mainstream novels.