Liverpool University Press Lewis Grassic Gibbon (Writers and their Work)

Lewis Grassic Gibbon galvanized the Scottish literary scene in 1932 with Sunset Song, a novel that drew vividly upon his upbringing in a croft in rural Aberdeenshire to capture the zeitgeist of the early twentieth century and provide a compelling moral mandate for social and political change in the inter-war period. Gibbon's compassionate and lyrical study of the pains and pleasures of his heroine Chris Guthrie growing up around the First World War regularly earns him the accolade of his country's favourite author. However, his literary legacy stretches far beyond the first Gibbon novel; the succeeding volumes of the epic trilogy A Scots Quair chronicle his heroine's experiences in the modern mill town in Cloud Howe and in the grim industrial city in Grey Granite and explore a wealth of ideological responses - social, cultural, political and philosophical - that are bracingly topical today. In a life cruelly cut short, Gibbon produced an astonishing total of seventeen full-length works, under his own name of James Leslie Mitchell as well as his Scots pseudonym, demonstrating his versatility as essayist, historian, biographer and fiction writer, all illuminated by his profound humanitarianism. The time is ripe for this fresh reappraisal of the full canon of an author whose fame in recent years has carried well beyond his native Scotland, and whose modernist experimentation with language and narrative earns him a place among the foremost writers of fiction of the twentieth century. Review William K. Malcolms book is a fascinating and comprehensive introduction to the life and work of Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Setting Gibbon's writing within the tumultuous historical contexts of the period, Malcolm portrays a hugely talented and hard-working novelist of radical political commitment whose tragically short life culminated in the achievement of A Scots Quair, one of the great novel sequences in twentieth-century literature in English. --Dr Scott Lyall, Edinburgh Napier University About the Author William K. Malcolm holds a PhD from the University of Aberdeen and was Head of English at Keith Grammar School until his retirement in 2015. He is Literary Director of the Grassic Gibbon Centre at Arbuthnott.