scott lyall
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scottlyall.bsky.social
scott lyall
@scottlyall.bsky.social
Hyperlocal aesthete, spiritual atheist, professional dilettante
Debut novel wins Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year 2025 | The Herald share.google/fith9Z90VkVf...
Debut novel wins Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year 2025
Only Here, Only Now by Tom Newlands has been announced as the Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year 2025.
share.google
November 13, 2025 at 10:36 PM
Leonard and Hungry Paul is beautiful.
November 13, 2025 at 9:33 PM
Reposted by scott lyall
Call for Papers: 5th World Congress of Scottish Literatures: Scotland Along the New Silk Road (17-20 June 2027, Nanjing Normal University, China). Deadline for submissions: 30 November 2026.
Call for Papers: 5th World Congress of Scottish Literatures: Scotland Along the New Silk Road (17-20 June 2027)
The Fifth World Congress of Scottish Literatures will be held at Nanjing Normal University in Nanjing, China, on 17-20 June 2027. Being China’s first city designated as a “UNESCO City of Literature…
scotlit-iassl.org
November 11, 2025 at 11:24 AM
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🔴 Muriel Spark to be honoured in first ever memorial dedicated to a woman in Edinburgh's Princes Street Gardens

www.scotsman.com/arts-and-cul...
Muriel Spark to be honoured in first ever memorial dedicated to a woman in gardens
The memorial will be the first dedicated to a woman in Princes Street Gardens
www.scotsman.com
November 4, 2025 at 5:30 PM
Reposted by scott lyall
Lunch companion
November 1, 2025 at 1:37 PM
Reposted by scott lyall
Poet, writer, artist, & avant-gardener Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006) was born 100 years ago #OTD, 28 Oct, in Nassau, Bahamas. His father was a bootlegger, & Finlay was sent, aged 6, to Larchfield, a boarding school in Helensburgh, Scotland, where WH Auden had recently joined the staff

A 🎂🧵
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October 28, 2025 at 3:04 PM
Sydney Goodsir Smith, one of the great lyric and love poets of the twentieth century in any language, not merely Scots. His reputation still, and wrongly, sits in the shadow of Hugh MacDiarmid. Smith's Under the Eildon Tree: A Poem in XXIV Elegies, is one of the great poetic sequences in Scots.
In Gránada, in Gránada,
They dumbed the mou o a makar,
In Gránada, in Gránada,
They strak doun Garcia Lorca…

—“In Gránada, in Gránada”, by Syndey Goodsir Smith (1915–1975) – a major figure in the #C20th Scottish renaissance, born #OTD, 26 Oct
#poem #poetry
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asls.org.uk/publications...
October 26, 2025 at 5:13 PM
Reposted by scott lyall
#31DaysofHalloween #Halloween #Halloween2025. It was reading this book at 19—with all its dizzying imagery of ancient sacrifice & ordeals by fire & water—that drew me into anthropology. McNeill lovingly recycles all sorts of pseudo-ethnographic mumpsimus—BUT she does conjure seasonal eldritch magic
October 24, 2025 at 4:35 PM
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Call for Papers: ‘Our three-voiced country’: Twentieth-century cross-currents in Gaelic and other Scottish writing. The 2026 annual conference of the Association for Scottish Literature will be held at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig on 26–28 June.
2026 ASL Annual Conference - Sabhal Mòr Ostaig
‘Our three-voiced country’: Twentieth-century cross-currents in Gaelic and other Scottish writing
www.smo.uhi.ac.uk
October 22, 2025 at 10:14 AM
Autumn Edinburgh sky
October 21, 2025 at 5:17 PM
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Dreaming the Daily Darg: Working Lives in Scottish Writing since 1918
Studies in Scottish Literature 50/1, 2025

A special issue exploring work & working life in Scottish writing chiefly of the 20th & 21st centuries – available now on Open Access
#litstudies
scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol50/is...
October 20, 2025 at 2:39 PM
Reposted by scott lyall
A new revised and annotated edition of Sydney Goodsir Smith's Collected Poems was published this year by Calder. Looking forward to working my way through it.
October 19, 2025 at 8:48 PM
A new revised and annotated edition of Sydney Goodsir Smith's Collected Poems was published this year by Calder. Looking forward to working my way through it.
October 19, 2025 at 8:48 PM
Reposted by scott lyall
To Fife and beyond
October 18, 2025 at 4:01 PM
Reposted by scott lyall
Swans on the Tay. And heard pink-footed geese arriving
October 18, 2025 at 3:50 PM
To Fife and beyond
October 18, 2025 at 4:01 PM
Swans on the Tay. And heard pink-footed geese arriving
October 18, 2025 at 3:50 PM
Reposted by scott lyall
For those of you in Scotland, come along to the launch of Race and the Scottish Enlightenment at @iashedinburgh.bsky.social! Bruce and I will be introducing the book, and we’re thrilled to be joined by the formidable Colin Kidd, Thomas Ahnert, Matthew D Eddy, Rosi Carr and Ian Stewart. Programme⬇️
Book launch: "Race and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Colonial History, 1750-1820" (Yale UP)

Wed 29 Oct, 16:45-20:00, including drinks

Featuring a host of IASH alumni, this event celebrates the new volume by Linda Andersson Burnett & Bruce Buchan.

raceandthescottishenlightenment.eventbrite.co.uk
Race and the Scottish Enlightenment: Book Launch and Discussion
Join authors Bruce Buchan and Linda Andersson Burnett to celebrate "Race and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Colonial History 1750-1820".
raceandthescottishenlightenment.eventbrite.co.uk
October 9, 2025 at 8:30 AM
Indian summer in Edinburgh
October 12, 2025 at 4:06 PM
Reposted by scott lyall
Anyway, today is World Migratory Bird Day, so I invite you to spend a minute contemplating those extraordinary journeys, perhaps by looking at the European Migration Atlas. migrationatlas.org
Bird Migration Atlas
This online Migration Atlas covers the huge geographical area represented by two continents, encompassing the flyways between Eurasia and Africa. Movements in time and space of 300 bird species are ma...
migrationatlas.org
October 11, 2025 at 12:43 PM
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Looking at John Bellany's work in the NLS today. This is 'Pourquoi? II', which Bellany painted after visiting the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1967 - a life-changing moment for the artist. Resurrection?
October 10, 2025 at 10:32 AM
Reposted by scott lyall
'Our Lady of the Hills.' (1921) The word anathemata, as David Jones unpicks it in his introduction to what later became an epic poem, means a lifting up and a setting apart of something for our particular savouring. A precise reading of what art is and always should be.
October 10, 2025 at 6:34 PM
Looking at John Bellany's work in the NLS today. This is 'Pourquoi? II', which Bellany painted after visiting the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1967 - a life-changing moment for the artist. Resurrection?
October 10, 2025 at 10:32 AM