Retired Keith Grammar School English teacher writes new book on Scots' favourite Lewis Grassic Gibbon
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A RETIRED Moray English teacher has penned a new study of one of Scotland's most enduring authors – Lewis Grassic Gibbon.
The life and works of Gibbon have been a lifelong obsession for Dr Bill Malcolm, from Aberlour, who has written, broadcast and taught on the writer over four decades. His PhD on Gibbon was published in 1984.
To this day, Gibbon's classic Sunset Song, published in 1932 as the first in the trilogy A Scots Quair, tops reader polls in Scotland. Earlier this year First Minister Nicola Sturgeon wrote an introduction to a Canongate new edition of her favourite book, saying the main character of Chris Guthrie helped her to "make sense of the girl I was".
The writer started out as a north-east newspaper reporter. He died in 1935, aged just 33.
Since retiring in 2015 as head of English at Keith Grammar School, a post he held for 25 years, Dr Malcolm has been able to devote his energy and time to his specialist subject.
He has held the role of literary director at the Grassic Gibbon Centre, at Arbuthnott in Gibbon's Mearns heartland, since it opened in 1992.
Dr Malcolm edited Sunset Song for Penguin Classics in 2007, published two books on Gibbon in 2016, and was made an Honorary Fellow of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies in 2017.
Last year Gibbon's family bestowed a great honour on Dr Malcolm by appointing him as joint administrator of the literary estate of James Leslie Mitchell, Gibbon's real name.
His latest study of Gibbon is part of a series, "Writers and their Work", about authors from across the world and from all eras. Backed by the British Council, the text is published by Liverpool University Press on Monday, November 30.
The new work is aimed primarily at academic institutions, and is available in hardback and ebook formats.
Dr Malcolm said: "Gibbon is an author who reaches ordinary people with the sheer power of his writing, which gives his work a unique resonance.
"Gibbon’s achievement is too often devalued by his representation as a great Scottish writer.
"He is a truly great writer by any objective criteria, in terms of his timeless ideas and outlook, his humanitarianism, his passionate championing of the underdog, his feminist sympathies, and his understanding of the profound importance of the natural environment."
The Speyside academic had hoped to be able to promote his new book at the Scottish Literature International conference in Prague in June, where he’d been invited to present a paper, but the pandemic forced a postponement until next summer.
Dr Malcolm added that Gibbon was "now recognised across the world as a writer of the very highest order".
"Translations of his best work, especially the great trilogy, A Scots Quair, have come out recently in Germany and, just this month, in Spain. He’s now acclaimed as a leading figure in the modernist movement in fiction, alongside James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner."
Dr Malcolm is now working on the typescripts for another two major books on Gibbon – an edited miscellany of his secondary writings, and a full biography, authorised by his family.
He added: "After that, it’s maybe time for me to begin to look around at other writers ..."
