WAITING for exam results can scar you for life. I have a friend who, 50 years on, still has nightmares about her Highers. Others, like me, remember the hollow feeling as the letter landed on the doormat, within which lay our university degree. This mental torment, however, is as nothing to the agony...

It is with the greatest regret that the Board of Scottish Review of Books Limited announce a break in regular publication of the PRINT edition of the quarterly magazine. Our latest funding application has been turned down by Creative Scotland, part-funder of the magazine for the last 15 years. We hope...

Celestial Bodie by Jokha Alharthi, the winning novel in this year's Man Booker International Prize, is published in-translation by Sandstone Press in Inverness.

The village of Bellaghy has become a place of pilgrimage not for martyrs but for poetry lovers who come to pay homage to Seamus Heaney who died in 2013, aged 73. The grave and its simple headstone are a modest tribute to a writer who is credited with unifying his country and who remained faithful to...

  THERE is already a strong body of responses, in oral literature, song, story, drama, fiction and non-fiction to the loss of 201 lives within yards of Holm shore at the entrance to Stornoway harbour on the first morning of 1919. It took the combination of oral language and melody for the grieving...

  ‘FUCKING Glasgow, my friend, it’s just like Belfast, the same rivalries, the same segregated pubs, the same halls, the same murals, the same fucking teams; a friendly city once you get to know it. Plus you’re just as likely to get stabbed for your colours as you are back home, so as you...

  ROBERT Macfarlane, whose career has been in steep ascent since 2003, began with a book about mountains – their fatal, perhaps even natal allure; in such places one can meet one’s death yet also feel reborn. He is known as a prose-poet of high places, ‘north-minded’ as he once called himself,...

  IN the reviewing trade, a new book can drop through the letterbox at nine o’clock one morning, and be read, reviewed and put on a shelf, or in the charity box, by six the following evening. As Norman Mailer once pointed out, ‘the underlying force in book reviewing is journalism’. It is...

  ONCE at Bay of Skaill on the west coast of Orkney, I saw a ring of wave-beaten stones, each one large enough to sit on, enclosing a pile of charred driftwood. Years later, on the beach at Maidens, not so far from where I grew up in Ayrshire, I caught the last shock of flame in a smaller stone...

  2. In the ages of Owls his companions Were the bipeds with hands. No beak, No plumage, round shaped feet, no talons, No hunting skills, No talent Apart from words. Ancestor Owl learnt from Cousin Kestrel To understand, to calibrate the edge That borders celebration in their gift of tongues. That...