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The Saltire Book Awards:How They BeganPaul Henderson Scott In his great book, The Democratic Intellect, George Davie said that Scotland "distinctive national inheritance was more than once brought to the very brink of ruin only to be saved at the last minute by a sudden burst of reviving energy". There was such a brink of ruin following the First World War, probably as a consequence of the heavy casualties, second only to Serbia among the countries involved. George Malcolm Thomson and others wrote books arguing that all serious intellectual and artistic life in Scotland had been eroded beyond recovery. In his Scottish Journey of 1935 Edwin Muir concluded that Scotland was a country that "is becoming lost to history". These prophets of doom were too pessimistic. In the 1920s Hugh MacDiarmid was already writing his early poems in Scots and beginning his explosive campaign to revive and transform Scotland. That was a vital part of "the sudden burst of reviving energy": but another was the creation of the Saltire Society in 1936. The Scottish National Party, The National Trust for Scotland and Scottish PEN were founded at about the same time as part of a similar response to the same crisis. The Saltire Society set itself the task of encouraging "everything that might improve the quality of life in Scotland and restore the country to its proper place as a creative force in European civilisation". It used a great variety of methods: publications, conferences, performances, agitation, and awards for many activities from housing, design, civil engineering and science to school choirs. It is always open to proposals for other ways to serve its objectives, as I have confirmed from my own experience. I have been a member of the Saltire Society since I came across its poetry readings and recitals of folk songs in the early days of the 1939-45. War. After that when I was abroad either with the Army or the Diplomatic Service, I came back to Edinburgh whenever I could and a particular pleasure was the excellent performances which the Society used to present (but, alas, no longer) during the Edinburgh Festival. When I returned finally to Edinburgh in 1980 I became a member of the Council of the Society and put a number of proposals to them and met with a very positive response. Among them was the very obvious need for the Society to recognise and encourage the flourishing state of Scottish literature by a book award. At that time there was the Agnes Mure Mackenzie Award for books on Scottish history, but that was all. It was only afterwards that I discovered that an earlier book award had been established in 1937. The first panel consisted of Eric Linklater, Compton Mackenzie and Edwin Muir and Neil Gunn's Highland Review was the first book to be selected. The 1939 war had brought this scheme to an abrupt end with a short revival in the 1950s which had only a brief life, probably because of lack of funds. In 1981 the Council responded enthusiastically to the idea and almost immediately I found an equally enthusiastic sponsor in the Royal Bank of Scotland. Their rules limited them to supporting any project for six years only, but during that time they not only paid the costs but arranged splendid award ceremonies in their impressive Head Office in St.Andrews Square. At the end of the six years Magnus Linklater, then Editor of The Scotsman, not only spontaneously offered to take over the sponsorship but had the admirable idea to propose the addition of a new award for the Scottish First Book of the Year by a previously unpublished writer. Subsequently Scottish television joined in the sponsorship. In 1998 Alan Marchbank of the National Library of Scotland proposed the addition of an award for the Scottish Research Book of the Year. At present the Faculty of Advocates is the sponsor. With James Boswell, Sir Walter Scott and R.L.Stevenson among their former members the faculty is very conscious of its literary associations. From the beginning we defined the scope of the Award for the Scottish Book of the Year (and the same definition applied also to the two additional awards) as for any new book by an author of Scottish descent or living in Scotland or a book by anyone on a Scottish subject. Unlike many other awards it was therefore not confined to words of imaginative literature such as novels, poetry or plays, but it included books of any kind. For example David Daiches won an award in 1984 for his Gifford lectures, God and the Poets, and Duncan Macmillan in 1991 for his book, Scottish Art, 1460-1990. Even so, novels and poetry have been the most frequent winners. It was a fortunate coincidence that the obvious winner when the Award began in 1982 was Alasdair Gray's Lanark, a powerful demonstration that Scottish literature had embarked on a new age of achievement. From the beginning and for several years later the Award panel consisted of Angus Calder, Ian Campbell, Douglas Gifford, Isobel Murray, Alan Taylor, Derick Thomson and myself as Convener. In the Saltire tradition (again unlike many other awards) all gave up a good deal of their time without any award apart from the satisfaction of doing something useful in a Scottish cause and the pleasure of reading the books and our subsequent discussion of them. One of our members once said that it was the best conversation in Edinburgh. After twelve years I decided that it was time that I should resign and make way for another Convener; but it has given me great satisfaction to see that the Award has become firmly established as an important contribution to the vitality of Scottish writing. Top of page How to choose a winner?How does one choose a winner: Come of the big book prizes say quite a lot in public about disagreement and agreement, but the Saltire Society has gone quietly about the business for a quarter of a century, the composition of the panel changing from time to time, trying always to balance gender, specialism, Gaelic, age-group. We read about a hundred books a year (for two prizes - the Saltire book of the Year, and the Saltire First book of the Year) and we winnow them fiercely in a series of Autumn meetings to produce a final winner in each category for the presentation ceremony on or near St Andrew's Day. What never fails to impress is the variety and the energy of books coming from Scotland, or from Scots, or dealing with Scottish themes - nor (each year) the first book which surprise and often announce the arrival of a major talent. We have picked a few real winners in our time. With generous sponsors over the years, or with its won resources, the Saltire has ensured a very public prize for Scottish writing and with an arcane voting system which ensures fairness (and makes tactical voting all but impossible) we eventually reach our puff of smoke after the last, fierce debate in November, only to retreat behind a wall of silence till the public announcement. Over the years the panel has been chaired by Paul H Scott, and more recently alternately by Ian Campbell and Douglas Gifford. The Panel today is (alphabetically) Allan Boyd, Ian Campbell, Douglas Gifford, Ann Matheson, Joyce McMillan, David Robb and Marion Sinclair. Pat members have been Angus Calder, Alison Lumsden, Isobel Murray, Paul Scott and Derick Thomson. - and we have borrowed expertise from Gaelic specialists at various points. Finally the Saltire office has made the whole thing possible by it tireless good nature. Top of page Non fiction prose, often the poor relation in literary prizes, has not been neglected by the Saltire adjudicators despite the difficulty it faces annually in trying to reach a fair comparison between different genres. Some years, some authors simply stand out for the quality of both their thinking and their writing. Such books are Neil Ascherson's Black Sea (1995), and in 1988 he was co-winner with Games with Shadows along with Tom Nairn's The Enchanted Glass: Britain and its Monarchy. Two ferociously independent and well-informed Scottish voices were rightly honoured for the width of their well-travelled and well-read trenchant analyses of contemporary Britain. When Ascherson writes that For the past 15 years or so, British governments have tried to persuade the rest of us that the best judges of the national interest are...businessmen. This may be a ridiculous statement, but -- ominously -- fewer and fewer people laugh at it … he caught a mood of change and repositioning in British society which both writers have, in different ways, discussed over several decades, the break-up of Britain and the break-up of Scotland's place in what we think of as "Britain", and the place of our country in the wider international context which informed a splendid book like Ascherson's Black Sea. The Saltire Awards reward originality, but they also reward a lifetime's knowledge and scholarship, and twice they have highlighted achievements in lifetime study, once with Duncan Macmillan's magisterial study of Scottish Art: 1460 - 1990 (1990) and once with David Daiches' incomparable God and the Poets (1984). Scottish art is too easily pigeon-holed or labeled and diminished by the label: what Duncan Macmillan produced was a wide-ranging full coverage which showed the sweep and achievement of Scottish art, its development over centuries which are little known as well as authoritative discussion of the better-known or even famous paintings and painters. David Daiches, whose recent death (15th July 2005) is an impoverishment to Scottish scholarship, brought to God and the Poets a lifetime's erudition and, in the book-length published version of his Gifford lectures delivered in Edinburgh, surveyed not only centuries of British writing, but centuries of writing from his own Jewish background, from Italy, from France, from USA - and with passion attacked the near-impossible task of public discussion of the intensely private expression of religious belief, expressed as literature, literature he discussed and criticized bringing Scottish authors such as Hogg and MacDiarmid to life as no one could have done without the enormous reading at his disposal. It will always be difficult to adjudge the success of a work of essay-writing, political argument, literary criticism or the survey of a field such as Scottish art against the sometimes more immediately attractive form of the novel, the play or the collection of poetry. The richness and variety of the books which the Saltire Award judges each year have ensured that non-fictional prose can on occasion rise and lead the field to take the prize. Ian Campbell Top of page |