Shift away from that gritty Glasgow stuff

fiction and poetry and unusually the message is being received loud and

clear south of the Border too.

Already their new Scots authors have caught Jonathan Cape Publishers

on the hop. The huge amount of media interest in Alison Kennedy and her

feted short stories, Now That You're Back, [reviewed by Iain Crichton

Smith in The Herald on February 5] was ''the archetypal publicist's

dream'', according to Rachel Cugnoni of Cape. That book was already

reprinting a week after its launch.

Irvine Welsh's follow-up to Trainspotting is a collection of stories,

The Acid House, which is reprinting even before publication. Janice

Galloway's novel Foreign Parts, due out in late April, looks set to

follow the trend: editor Robin Robertson deems it ''one of the most

important books I've read''. He's been proved a good judge of these

things: at Secker & Warburg he also brought to wide attention the work

of Jeff Torrington, James Kelman, and Dilys Rose.

Other highlights published in London include James Kelman's follow-up

to his Booker shortlisted A Disaffection, a novel, How Late It Was, How

Late, due out next month [to be reviewed in The Herald by Douglas Dunn].

Duncan McLean follows his stories, A Bucket of Tongues, with a novel,

Blackden. Agnes Owens publishes her first novel for years with A Working

Mother, and Candia McWilliam has Debatable Land out in June.

How would Robertson account for the resurgence of Scottish writing?

When he started in publishing 12 years ago he thought all the really

interesting stuff was coming from Ireland. ''Kelman and Gray were

writing, and Leonard if you dug a bit deeper -- but nothing from the

grass roots until three or four years ago.'' He ascribes much of the

credit to Kelman for encouraging young prose writers. ''He gave

confidence to writers to use their own voice and their own experience.''

Although Robertson believes it's no longer possible to pigeonhole

Scottish writers any more than English writers, and he does see a shift

away from ''the gritty Glasgow stuff'', most of these writers do come

from the Central Belt and are more likely to focus on housing schemes

than suburbia.

Typically these are young writers, often on only their second or third

books, often first published in Scotland but now by London houses, their

voices distinctively and vigorously Scottish but their work now

addressing increasingly wide audiences. There's a perceptible move away

from a domestic setting: Janice Galloway's novel Foreign Parts is set in

France, and Candia McWilliam's Debatable Land focuses on three Scots

sailing from Tahiti to New Zealand.

It's been a remarkable time too for Scottish poetry. At the end of

last year Carol Ann Duffy and the young Dundonian poet Don Paterson were

awarded major awards in the Forward Poetry Prize, and last month it was

announced that seven out of the 20 New Generation Poets picked to be

featured on Radio 1 are Scots. The critical reception, here and in

London, of Polygon's collection of 25 poets under 40 Dream States

[reviewed in The Herald on January 15] is testament to the vigour and

range of contemporary poetry.

As Kelman has been a model for the fiction writers, the new poets have

looked to the likes of Douglas Dunn, Tom Leonard, and Edwin Morgan (who

himself has a new collection in July). Scottish poetry has long been

international in outlook, and the young practitioners are no exception:

Bill Herbert's collection, Forked Tongues, due next month from Bloodaxe,

includes translations into Scots of Latin American verse, and modern

hymns to current Soviet leaders, consciously mimicking MacDiarmid.

Kathleen Jamie's next book Queen of Sheba (April) includes a poem

entitled A Dream of the Dalai Lama on Skye.

The only neglected area in creative writing seems to be for children

-- where are the lively novels of contemporary Scottish life for young

readers?