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| Professor Alan Riach |
This event was chaired by Linden Bicket. along with authors Kirsty Gunn and James Robertson: In a lively panel chat.
They discussed the Scotland of 1926 - A hundred years ago, Scottish literature was crackling with new energy. The authors revisited the Scottish Renaissance through landmark works including Hugh MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, the early work of Neil M Gunn (newly reissued this year), and other under-sung voices including Willa Muir and Helen Cruickshank.
The authors pursued their deep dive into a remarkable literary moment and the writers who helped reshape Scotland’s imaginative life.
Alan Riach said that back in the1930s, Montrose was the Paris of the north.
Alan Riach is a Scottish poet and academic. He taught at the University of Waikato in New Zealand from 1986 until 2001. He is currently the Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. Riach was President of the association for Scottish literary Studies from 2006 to 2010 and is a regular contributor to The National.
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| Kirsty Gunn |
Riach writes, “Irish reunification will come. Scotland’s independence will come. The political system and its media only exist for self perpetuation.
This too is ours to resist. These things will not prevail. The only reliable truths come through the arts and they remain accessible to people, discoverable, no matter how much our enemies have tried to obscure them or deny them their value and place.
What gives us the hope and the drive, the sense of necessary purpose. Music, stories, poems and plays: paintings, sculpture, colour and form, our languages, all that art can do.
How do we move forward. “It come with understanding, then knowledge, and then wisdom.
In the absence of this, Imagination must be served, or it feeds on itself; then superstitions come creeping in.
