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Writing Black Scotland: Race, Nation and the Devolution of Black Britain examines Blackness in devolutionary Scottish writing, bringing together two established contemporary literary-critical fields – Black British and Scottish literature – with significant implications for both. The book focuses on key literary works from the 1970s to the early 2000s, which emerge from and shape a period of history defined by post-imperial adjustment: a new British state politics of race centred on multiculturalism, the changing status of the Union, and the expanding racial diversity of Scotland itself. The book suggests that the larger world context of Black politics shaped the priorities of Scottish writers in the 1980s and 1990s, at the same time that Black writers were rising to prominence in Scottish letters. Following the referendum on devolved government in 1997, race and racism became even more important negotiations in the national space, evidenced by case studies of three texts directly addressing Blackness in Scotland. This ‘devolving’ of Black Britain parallels the shifting constitutional arrangements in contemporary Britain, implicating not only Scotland but Black British literary studies, which have largely left the integrity of the Union undisturbed. Writing Black Scotland critiques that unifying Britishness, recognisable in a confident state multiculturalism, with reference to the constitutional challenge from Scotland.

This volume constitutes the first collection of scholarly essays devoted to a sustained critical assessment of the writings of Kathleen Jamie, one of Scotland’s leading contemporary poets. Nationally and internationally acclaimed since her first major publications in the 1980s, Kathleen Jamie stands out from other contemporary poets in her exceptional musicality, her strikingly unusual perspectives, her wry humour, translucent imagery, and hard-edged economy of expression. In this collection of sixteen originally commissioned essays, the range of Jamie’s writing, from Black Spiders (1982) to Frissure (2013) is discussed, with attention both to her poetry, and new nature writing essays in prose. The collection adopts a range of critical approaches to Jamie’s work: ecocritical, formalist, philosophical, biographical, socio-political, gender-studies oriented, comparative, and more. There is a comprehensive Bibliography containing the only complete account to date, of Jamie’s works, including review, occasional poems, and radio interviews; as well as a survey of critical writing on Jamie and a list of awards for her work, up to 2015. The volume also breaks new ground formally by including original creative responses to Jamie’s work, with poems by leading contemporary poets including Michael Longley, Leontia Flynn and Fiona Sampson, among others. An original sound-recording archive of Jamie reading poems discussed at length in the volume, created in 2015, is also held at Edinburgh University Press, and is accessible only to readers of the volume.

Only in recent years has W. S. Graham come to be recognised as one of the great poets of the twentieth century. On the peripheries of UK poetry culture during his lifetime, he in many ways appears to us today as exemplary of the poetics of the mid-century: his extension of modernist explorations of rhythm and diction; his interweaving of linguistic and geographic places; his dialogue with the plastic arts; and the tensions that run through his work, between philosophical seriousness and play, between solitude and sociality, regionalism and cosmopolitanism, between the heft and evanescence of poetry’s medium. In the first concerted study of Graham’s poetics in a generation, David Nowell Smith draws on newly unearthed archival materials - poems, manuscripts, and visual/mixed-media work - to orient Graham’s poetics around the question of the ‘art object’. Graham sought throughout his work to craft his poems into honed, finished ‘objects’; yet he was also intensely aware that poems only live when released into their afterlives: the poem’s ‘finished object’ is never wholly finished. Nowell Smith situates this tension with broader debates around literary objecthood and builds up a broader reflection on language as a medium for art-making.