A complete recording of the opening seminar of the second season of the Emerging Critics programme is now available. Held at the National Library of Scotland on April 25th, 2018, the seminar saw a group of sixteen new participants and mentors gather for panel discussions on the present and future of...

Kristian Kerr talks with Emerging Critics mentor Dave Coates about expanding review coverage to include a variety of voices, challenging our conscious and unconscious biases as readers and writers, connections between academic and journalistic literary criticism, and the knotty issue of money. Listem...

In this episode David Robinson tells Kristian Kerr about his first meeting with his four mentees, who have been writing reviews of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Discussion topics include writing for the public, keeping a reader’s attention, reading each other’s work and being confident without...

Kristian Kerr talks with Emerging Critics mentor and Creative Scotland Literature Officer Kaite Welsh. Kaite offers perspectives on reviewing for print and online platforms and the complementary relationship between the two. Other areas of conversation include pitching to editors and the editorial process;...

This conversation with Literary Editor Rosemary Goring offers perspective on the current practice of reviewing. Rosemary and Kristian discuss criticism as surgical and precise as well as being more broadly diagnostic of the health of a culture. The conversation ranges across the health of the profession...

Editor Alan Taylor and Kristian Kerr discuss the Emerging Critics Programme, a partnership between the SRB and Creative Scotland, established to mentor new voices in cultural criticism. Topics include the state of criticism in Scotland today, the centrality of newspapers to cultural commentary, how...