25 Best Scottish Authors You Must Read: From Burns to Contemporary Masters

Scotland has produced writers wildly out of proportion to its size — from the national bard Robert Burns to the Booker Prize-winning Douglas Stuart. Here are 25 Scottish authors whose work defines, challenges, and reimagines what it means to write from this small, fierce country.

Scotland’s literary tradition is one of the oldest and most distinctive in the English-speaking world, though calling it an “English-speaking” tradition is itself complicated. Scottish literature has always existed in a state of productive tension between languages — English, Scots, and Gaelic — and between identities: Scottish, British, European, global. That tension has produced writing of extraordinary energy, from the wild satires of the 18th century to the gritty urban realism of the late 20th century and the experimental fiction of today.

The Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th century made Edinburgh one of the intellectual capitals of Europe, and writers like David Hume, Adam Smith, and Robert Burns were central to that achievement. The 19th century gave the world Walter Scott (who essentially invented the historical novel), Robert Louis Stevenson (who gave us Jekyll and Hyde and Treasure Island), and Arthur Conan Doyle (who gave us Sherlock Holmes). In the 20th century, Scottish writers pushed in new directions: Muriel Spark’s crystalline prose, Alasdair Gray’s postmodern experiments, James Kelman’s commitment to working-class Glaswegian voice, and Irvine Welsh’s explosive debut with Trainspotting in 1993.

Today, Scottish literature is thriving. Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain won the 2020 Booker Prize. Ali Smith has been shortlisted for the Booker four times. Crime writers like Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, and Denise Mina have made Scotland one of the great centers of crime fiction. And a new generation of writers — Graeme Macrae Burnet, Jenni Fagan, and others — continue to push the boundaries of what Scottish fiction can be.

For more on the broader British literary tradition, see our list of the best British authors. Fans of Scottish crime fiction will also enjoy our guides to the best thriller authors and the best mystery authors. And if you’re interested in other Celtic literary traditions, check out our list of the best Irish authors of all time.

Table of Contents

Where to Start vs. Deeper Cuts

If you’re new to Scottish literature, the comparison table above gives you a quick starting point. For a classic introduction, begin with Robert Burns’s poetry and Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. For modern Scottish fiction, Trainspotting and Shuggie Bain are essential. For crime, start with Ian Rankin’s Knots and Crosses or Val McDermid’s The Mermaids Singing.

For deeper cuts, seek out Alasdair Gray’s Lanark — arguably the most important Scottish novel of the 20th century — James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late, and Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat. These are books that reward patience and rereading.

Classic and Historical Scottish Authors

1. Robert Burns (1759-1796)

Robert Burns was born in Alloway, Ayrshire, on January 25, 1759, the eldest of seven children in a farming family. He received a solid education despite the family’s poverty, reading widely in English and Scottish literature. His first collection, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, was published in Kilmarnock in 1786 and was an immediate sensation. Burns became a celebrity in Edinburgh literary society, though he remained a farmer for most of his life and died at the age of 37, likely from rheumatic heart disease.

Burns wrote in both Scots and English, and his poems and songs range from savage political satire (“A Man’s a Man for A’ That”) to tender love lyrics (“A Red, Red Rose”) to bawdy humor to philosophical meditation on mortality (“To a Mouse”). He collected and preserved hundreds of traditional Scottish songs that might otherwise have been lost, contributing over 300 songs to James Johnson’s The Scots Musical Museum and George Thomson’s A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs.

Burns is Scotland’s national poet, and Burns Night (January 25) is celebrated worldwide with suppers featuring haggis, whisky, and recitations of his work. His influence on Scottish identity and literature is incalculable. Selected Poems and Songs of Robert Burns is the best starting point.

“O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us!“

2. Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh in 1771. A childhood bout of polio left him with a permanent limp, and he was sent to his grandparents’ farm in the Scottish Borders to recuperate, where he absorbed the ballads, legends, and oral traditions that would shape his writing. He trained as a lawyer and practiced at the bar while writing prolifically — first as a poet, then as a novelist.

Scott essentially invented the historical novel as a literary form. Waverley (1814), published anonymously, was the first of over two dozen novels set in Scottish and English history. Rob Roy (1817), The Heart of Midlothian (1818), and Ivanhoe (1819) followed in rapid succession. Scott’s novels were international bestsellers — he was the most popular novelist in the world during his lifetime — and his romanticized vision of Scotland and the Highlands profoundly shaped how the world imagined Scotland, for better and worse.

Scott’s personal life ended in financial disaster: he was ruined by the collapse of his publisher and spent his final years writing frantically to pay off enormous debts. He died at his beloved estate of Abbotsford in 1832. His monument on Princes Street in Edinburgh is the largest monument to a writer anywhere in the world.

Waverley is the place to start, though The Heart of Midlothian is often considered his finest work.

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive!“

3. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850 to a family of lighthouse engineers. He studied engineering and then law at the University of Edinburgh but knew from an early age that he wanted to write. His health was poor throughout his life — he suffered from a chronic lung condition, probably tuberculosis — and he spent years traveling in search of a climate that would ease his symptoms, eventually settling in Samoa, where he died at the age of 44.

Stevenson produced an astonishing body of work in his short life. Treasure Island (1883) defined the pirate adventure story. Kidnapped (1886) is a gripping historical novel set in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising of 1745. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) is a psychological masterpiece that gave the English language an enduring metaphor for the duality of human nature. His essays and travel writing — particularly Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879) — are models of the form.

Stevenson was immensely popular in his lifetime but was sometimes dismissed by critics as a mere adventure writer. That reputation has been thoroughly revised in recent decades; he’s now recognized as one of the great prose stylists of the Victorian era.

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde remains his most psychologically penetrating work, and it can be read in a single sitting.

“You cannot run away from a weakness; you must some time fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?“

4. Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)

Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859 and studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where one of his professors — Dr. Joseph Bell, known for his extraordinary powers of observation and deductive reasoning — became the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. Doyle practiced medicine in Southsea, England, while writing on the side, and the first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, was published in 1887.

Sherlock Holmes became one of the most famous fictional characters in literary history, and Doyle eventually grew both rich and resentful because of him. He killed Holmes off in “The Final Problem” (1893) but was forced by public demand to bring him back in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and subsequent stories. Beyond Holmes, Doyle wrote historical novels (The White Company, Sir Nigel), science fiction (The Lost World), and nonfiction.

Doyle was knighted in 1902 for his pamphlet defending the British conduct of the Boer War. In later life, he became a passionate advocate of Spiritualism, which damaged his reputation in some circles. He died in 1930.

Start with The Complete Sherlock Holmes — the four novels and 56 short stories remain among the most entertaining detective fiction ever written.

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

5. J.M. Barrie (1860-1937)

James Matthew Barrie was born in Kirriemuir, Angus, in 1860, the ninth of ten children. The death of his older brother David in an ice-skating accident when Barrie was six profoundly affected him and his mother, and many scholars have traced his obsession with childhood and the refusal to grow up to this formative loss.

Barrie wrote novels, journalism, and plays, but he’s remembered primarily for one creation: Peter Pan, the boy who wouldn’t grow up. Peter Pan first appeared in the 1902 novel The Little White Bird, then in the 1904 play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, and finally in the 1911 novel Peter and Wendy. The character has become so embedded in Western culture that it’s easy to forget how strange and dark the original stories are — Peter is not merely mischievous but genuinely dangerous, a child who forgets everyone and everything because he exists outside time.

Barrie bequeathed the copyright to Peter Pan to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London, where it has generated millions in royalties. Peter Pan is best read in its original novel form, Peter and Wendy.

“All children, except one, grow up.”

6. James Hogg (1770-1835)

James Hogg, known as the “Ettrick Shepherd,” was born in the Scottish Borders and worked as a shepherd for much of his life. Largely self-educated, he became a literary figure in Edinburgh through his friendship with Walter Scott and his contributions to Blackwood’s Magazine.

Hogg’s masterpiece is The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), a novel about a young man named Robert Wringhim who becomes convinced that, as one of the Calvinist elect, he is predestined for salvation and therefore cannot sin — no matter what he does. This theological premise leads Robert into a relationship with a mysterious stranger named Gil-Martin, who encourages him to commit increasingly terrible acts, including murder.

The novel is told through multiple unreliable narratives — an editor’s account, Robert’s own memoir, and documentary evidence that doesn’t quite add up. It was virtually ignored on publication and only rediscovered in the 20th century, championed by André Gide. Today it’s recognized as one of the most sophisticated and disturbing novels of the 19th century.

Confessions of a Justified Sinner is essential reading for anyone interested in Scottish literature, psychology, or religious extremism.

“I was a being incomprehensible to myself.”

20th Century Scottish Renaissance

The 20th century saw a flowering of Scottish literature, from the modernist experiments of Hugh MacDiarmid to the international success of Muriel Spark and the working-class fiction that emerged from Glasgow in the 1980s and ‘90s.

7. Muriel Spark (1918-2006)

Muriel Spark was born Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh in 1918. Her father was Jewish and her mother Presbyterian, and this dual heritage — along with her later conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1954 — informed much of her writing. She worked in intelligence during World War II, producing propaganda and disinformation, and that experience with deception and narrative control runs through all her fiction.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) is her most famous novel: set in 1930s Edinburgh, it follows an unorthodox teacher at a girls’ school who selects a group of favorites — her “creme de la creme” — and tries to mold them in her own image, with results that are by turns hilarious and devastating. Spark wrote the novel in just a few weeks, and its structure — jumping forward and backward in time, casually dropping future revelations into present-tense scenes — was strikingly original.

Spark wrote 22 novels in all, many of them short, sharp, and acidly funny. The Driver’s Seat (1970), The Girls of Slender Means (1963), and A Far Cry from Kensington (1988) are all superb. She lived in Italy from the 1960s until her death in 2006.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is the essential starting point — one of the finest short novels in the English language.

“Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.”

8. Alasdair Gray (1934-2019)

Alasdair Gray was born in Glasgow in 1934 and lived there for virtually his entire life. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art and worked as a painter, muralist, and playwright before publishing his first novel, Lanark: A Life in Four Books, in 1981 — when he was 47 years old. The novel had taken him nearly 30 years to write.

Lanark is divided into four books presented out of order (Books 3, 1, 2, 4), alternating between a realistic narrative about a young man named Duncan Thaw growing up in post-war Glasgow and a surreal, fantastical narrative about a man named Lanark in a dystopian city called Unthank. The book is a modern epic in the tradition of Joyce and Kafka, and it was immediately recognized as a landmark of Scottish — and world — literature. The poet and critic Edwin Morgan called it “the most significant Scottish novel since The House with the Green Shutters.”

Gray was also a visual artist, and he designed and illustrated all his own books. His other novels include 1982, Janine (1984) and Poor Things (1992), the latter of which was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film by Yorgos Lanthimos in 2023.

Lanark is the mountain to climb. It’s brilliant, maddening, and unlike anything else.

“Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.”

9. James Kelman (b. 1946)

James Kelman was born in Glasgow in 1946 and left school at 15 to work in a series of manual jobs. He came to writing late, publishing his first collection of short stories, An Old Pub Near the Angel, in 1973. His fiction is written almost entirely in Glaswegian dialect, and his commitment to representing working-class Scottish speech without apology or translation was radical and controversial.

How Late It Was, How Late (1994) won the Booker Prize and provoked a storm of criticism. One of the judges, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, called it a “disgrace” and said it should not have won. The novel follows Sammy Samuels, a Glasgow man who wakes up in police custody, blind, and tries to navigate the indifferent bureaucracy of the social services system. It’s written in a stream-of-consciousness style heavily influenced by Kafka and Beckett, and it’s both bleak and darkly funny.

Kelman’s refusal to code-switch — to present working-class Scots dialect as somehow requiring a standard English frame — was a political and artistic statement that influenced a generation of writers, including Irvine Welsh and Douglas Stuart.

How Late It Was, How Late is demanding but rewarding. His short story collections are excellent entry points.

“The fact is I’ve no been well. I’m no well. I mean that’s a fact.”

10. Iain Banks / Iain M. Banks (1954-2013)

Iain Banks was born in Dunfermline, Fife, in 1954 and studied English, philosophy, and psychology at the University of Stirling. His debut novel, The Wasp Factory (1984), was one of the most controversial and talked-about British novels of the decade — a Gothic tale of a teenage boy on a remote Scottish island who has committed three murders. Reviews ranged from “a work of unparalleled depravity” to “a brilliant first novel.”

Banks wrote literary fiction under the name Iain Banks and science fiction under the name Iain M. Banks. His science fiction, particularly the Culture series — beginning with Consider Phlebas (1987) — imagines a post-scarcity utopian civilization and is widely regarded as some of the finest space opera ever written. His literary novels include The Crow Road (1992), Complicity (1993), and The Bridge (1986).

Banks was diagnosed with terminal cancer in early 2013 and died on June 9 of that year. He was 59. His death was mourned across the literary and science fiction communities, and he remains one of the most beloved Scottish writers of his generation.

Start with The Wasp Factory for literary fiction or Consider Phlebas for science fiction.

“It was just another of those things that are so unfair, like life. In general.”

11. Irvine Welsh (b. 1958)

Irvine Welsh was born in Leith, Edinburgh, in 1958. He left school at 16 and worked in a series of jobs before studying at Heriot-Watt University. Trainspotting was published in 1993 and became a cultural phenomenon — a raw, funny, harrowing novel about a group of heroin addicts in Leith, written in a dense Edinburgh dialect that many English readers initially found impenetrable.

The novel was adapted into a film by Danny Boyle in 1996, starring Ewan McGregor as Mark Renton, and the film became one of the defining cultural artifacts of the 1990s. Welsh’s writing is deliberately provocative — profane, graphic, and uncomfortable — but beneath the shock value is a sharp intelligence and genuine compassion for characters living in the wreckage of deindustrialized Scotland.

Welsh has published numerous novels since, including Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995), Filth (1998), Glue (2001), and The Blade Artist (2016), as well as the sequel Porno (2002) and Dead Men’s Trousers (2018).

Trainspotting remains his essential work — one of the most important British novels of the late 20th century.

“Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family.”

12. Ian Rankin (b. 1960)

Ian Rankin was born in Cardenden, Fife, in 1960 and studied English at the University of Edinburgh. He published his first Inspector Rebus novel, Knots and Crosses, in 1987, intending it as a modern reworking of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde. He didn’t initially realize he’d written a crime novel — but the public and the critics did, and Rebus became one of the most popular characters in British crime fiction.

The Rebus series now comprises over 20 novels and is set almost entirely in Edinburgh. Rankin uses the crime novel format to explore Edinburgh’s social geography — the tension between the city’s respectable facade and its violent underbelly. Rebus himself is a classic flawed detective: stubborn, hard-drinking, insubordinate, and deeply moral in his own way. The series is also a remarkable chronicle of how Edinburgh has changed over four decades.

Rankin has sold over 30 million books worldwide and has been awarded the OBE, the CBE, and multiple Crime Writers’ Association Daggers. He was appointed Deputy Lieutenant of Edinburgh in 2022.

Start with Knots and Crosses or, if you want to jump to where the series really hits its stride, Black and Blue (1997).

“Edinburgh is a schizophrenic city. It has its public face and its private face.”

If you’re a writer working on your own fiction — or even detailed blog posts about literature — having a tool like Grammarly to check your grammar and style can make a significant difference. It’s especially useful when you’re writing across multiple drafts and need a fresh pair of eyes on the page.

13. Alexander McCall Smith (b. 1948)

Alexander McCall Smith was born in what is now Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) in 1948 and moved to Scotland as a young man. He became a professor of medical law at the University of Edinburgh and wrote academic texts on law and bioethics before turning to fiction in his fifties. His debut novel, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (1998), set in Botswana and featuring the inimitable Precious Ramotswe, became a global bestseller.

McCall Smith is extraordinarily prolific, having published well over 100 books. His series include the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (over 20 volumes), the 44 Scotland Street series (set in Edinburgh), the Isabel Dalhousie series, and the Professor Dr von Igelfeld series. His tone is warm, gentle, and humorous — a deliberate contrast to the darkness of much contemporary crime fiction.

Critics have sometimes dismissed his work as lightweight, but his huge readership testifies to a genuine gift for character, place, and moral observation. He was appointed CBE in 2007.

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is a charming, humane entry point.

“The world, Mma Ramotswe believed, was divided into two sorts of people: those who were kind, and those who were not.”

14. Val McDermid (b. 1955)

Val McDermid was born in Kirkcaldy, Fife, in 1955 and studied English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford — she was one of the first students from a Scottish state school to be admitted. She worked as a journalist for 16 years, including time as a national bureau chief in Manchester, before turning to fiction full-time.

McDermid is one of the most successful crime writers in the world, with over 40 novels to her name. Her best-known series features clinical psychologist Tony Hill and detective Carol Jordan, beginning with The Mermaids Singing (1995), which won the Gold Dagger from the Crime Writers’ Association. The series was adapted as the ITV television show Wire in the Blood. She also writes the Karen Pirie series and standalone novels.

McDermid’s fiction is psychologically acute and often graphically violent — she doesn’t shy away from depicting the reality of serious crime. Her research is meticulous; she has long-standing relationships with forensic scientists and police officers. She was awarded the CWA Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement in 2017.

Start with The Mermaids Singing for the Tony Hill series or A Place of Execution (1999) for a superb standalone.

“Justice is not always the same thing as law.”

Contemporary Scottish Voices

15. Ali Smith (b. 1962)

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and studied English at the University of Aberdeen, where she also lectured before becoming a full-time writer. She is one of the most formally adventurous and critically acclaimed British writers of her generation, having been shortlisted for the Booker Prize four times and winning the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Costa Book Award.

Smith’s Seasonal Quartet — Autumn (2016), Winter (2017), Spring (2019), Summer (2020) — is an extraordinary achievement: four novels written and published in near-real-time, responding to the political and social upheavals of Brexit-era Britain. Her earlier novels include Hotel World (2001), How to be Both (2014), and There but for the (2011). Her prose is playful, allusive, and deeply humane, full of wordplay, literary references, and sudden shifts in perspective.

Smith is one of those writers who makes the novel form feel alive and unpredictable. How to be Both is perhaps the best entry point — a novel in two halves that can be read in either order.

“Here’s an old story so old that the stones crumble at its edges.”

16. Denise Mina (b. 1966)

Denise Mina was born in Glasgow in 1966 and grew up in various locations around Scotland, England, and Europe. She studied law and did a PhD on mental illness and female offenders before publishing her first novel, Garnethill (1998), which won the Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey Dagger for best first crime novel.

Mina’s crime fiction is rooted in Glasgow and fiercely political, dealing with poverty, domestic violence, institutional corruption, and the failures of the justice system. Her series include the Garnethill trilogy, the Paddy Meehan series, and the Alex Morrow series. She has also written graphic novels — including an adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy — and nonfiction, including The Less Dead (2020), about the unsolved murders of sex workers in Glasgow.

Mina is sometimes overshadowed by Rankin and McDermid in discussions of Scottish crime fiction, but her work is every bit as powerful and often angrier.

Garnethill is the place to start.

“Glasgow is a city built on rage.”

17. Peter May (b. 1951)

Peter May was born in Glasgow in 1951 and spent years working as a television screenwriter and producer before turning to fiction. He wrote for Scottish television series including Donn and the Mermaid and created and wrote the drama series Donn a-mach. His breakthrough in fiction came with the Lewis Trilogy — The Blackhouse (2011), The Lewis Man (2012), and The Chessmen (2013) — set on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides.

The Lewis Trilogy features Edinburgh detective Fin Macleod, who returns to his childhood home on Lewis to investigate murders and finds himself confronting his own past. May’s evocation of the Hebridean landscape — the raw weather, the tight-knit communities, the clash between tradition and modernity — is magnificent. These are crime novels, but they’re also novels about memory, identity, and belonging.

May has also written the Enzo Files series, set in France, and the China Thrillers series. The Blackhouse is the essential starting point.

“The wind carved the landscape into something brutal and beautiful.”

18. Stuart MacBride (b. 1969)

Stuart MacBride was born in Dumbarton in 1969 and grew up in Aberdeen, which provides the setting for his Logan McRae crime series. The series began with Cold Granite (2005) and now runs to over a dozen novels. MacBride’s Aberdeen is grey, rain-lashed, and populated by an entertaining array of criminals, misfits, and long-suffering police officers.

MacBride’s great strength is the balance between darkness and humor. His crime scenes are convincingly grim, but his dialogue is sharp and often very funny, and his recurring characters have developed real depth over the course of the series. He’s also written the standalone A Dark So Deadly (2017) and the Ash Henderson series.

MacBride has won the CWA Dagger in the Library for the body of his work and has sold over two million copies in the UK alone.

Cold Granite is the starting point for the Logan McRae series.

“Aberdeen: where even the seagulls look depressed.”

19. Graeme Macrae Burnet (b. 1967)

Graeme Macrae Burnet was born in Kilmarnock in 1967 and lives in Glasgow. His second novel, His Bloody Project (2015), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and became an unlikely bestseller. Set in a remote Highland crofting community in 1869, it takes the form of a collection of documents — the accused murderer’s memoir, witness statements, a medical report, and a trial transcript — relating to a triple murder committed by a young man named Roderick Macrae.

The novel is a tour de force of literary ventriloquism. Burnet’s recreation of 19th-century prose styles is flawless, and the documentary format keeps the reader constantly questioning what’s true. Is Roderick a cold-blooded killer? A victim of systematic oppression by the village constable? Or something more complicated? The book refuses to give easy answers.

Burnet followed it with The Accident on the A35 (2017) and Case Study (2021), both of which continue his fascination with unreliable documents and the impossibility of knowing the truth.

His Bloody Project is one of the best Scottish novels of the 21st century.

“I am writing this account in the full knowledge that it will be used as evidence against me.”

20. Douglas Stuart (b. 1976)

Douglas Stuart was born in Glasgow in 1976 and raised in the housing schemes of Sighthill. His mother was an alcoholic who died when he was 16, and her story — refracted and transformed through fiction — became the basis of his debut novel, Shuggie Bain (2020), which won the 2020 Booker Prize.

Shuggie Bain is set in 1980s Glasgow during the devastation of Thatcherism. Agnes Bain is a proud, glamorous woman whose life is destroyed by alcoholism, and her youngest son Shuggie — gentle, effeminate, and devoted to his mother — watches helplessly as she spirals. The novel is unflinching in its depiction of addiction, poverty, and the cruelty of children toward anyone who’s different, but it’s also deeply tender and shot through with love.

Stuart moved to New York as a young man and built a successful career in fashion design before turning to writing. His second novel, Young Mungo (2022), set in the same Glasgow housing schemes, tells the story of two teenage boys — one Protestant, one Catholic — who fall in love across the sectarian divide.

Shuggie Bain is the defining Scottish novel of the 2020s. It is devastating, beautiful, and essential.

“He had the most open face, so you could see every hurt.”

21. Jenni Fagan (b. 1977)

Jenni Fagan was born in 1977 and grew up in the Scottish care system, moving between over 40 foster homes and residential units. That experience of institutional life and rootlessness infuses her fiction. Her debut novel, The Panopticon (2012), was named one of the best debut novels of 2012 by The Guardian, Financial Times, and others, and she was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2013.

The Panopticon follows Anais Hendricks, a fifteen-year-old in care who is taken to a residential unit called the Panopticon after a policewoman is put in a coma during her arrest. The novel is narrated in Anais’s furious, funny, drugged-up voice, and it’s a searing indictment of a system that is supposed to protect children but often fails them utterly.

Fagan’s subsequent novels include The Sunlight Pilgrims (2016), set in a Scottish caravan park during an apocalyptic winter, and Luckenbooth (2021), an ambitious multigenerational novel set in a single Edinburgh tenement building over the course of a century.

The Panopticon is a fierce, original debut.

“The experiment is to see if people who are watched enough begin to police themselves.”

22. Andrew O’Hagan (b. 1968)

Andrew O’Hagan was born in Glasgow in 1968 and grew up in Kilwinning, Ayrshire. He studied English at the University of Strathclyde and has worked as a journalist, essayist, and novelist. His nonfiction book The Missing (1995), about people who disappear — from murder victims to homeless men — established him as a major new literary voice.

His novels include Our Fathers (1999), about three generations of a Scottish family set against the rise and fall of public housing, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Holtzbrinck Award for Fiction. Be Near Me (2006) tells the story of an English Catholic priest in a Scottish parish, and Mayflies (2020) is a tender novel about male friendship, set partly in the Scottish rave culture of the late 1980s and partly in the present as one of the two friends faces terminal illness.

O’Hagan’s prose is luminous and his ear for working-class Scottish speech is exact. He’s also a significant essayist and critic, contributing regularly to the London Review of Books.

Mayflies is perhaps his most accessible and moving novel.

“We were young and we were mortal and that was the point of everything.”

23. Jackie Kay (b. 1961)

Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father and was adopted by a white Scottish couple and raised in Glasgow. Her experience of being Black in Scotland, of adoption, and of identity has been the central subject of her writing across poetry, fiction, and memoir.

Her novel Trumpet (1998) is based loosely on the true story of jazz musician Billy Tipton, who was discovered after death to have been assigned female at birth. In the novel, Scottish jazz trumpeter Joss Moody dies and is revealed to have been living as a man; the narrative explores the aftermath through multiple perspectives — his wife Millie, his adopted son Colman, and a tabloid journalist. It’s a novel about love, identity, and the right to define yourself on your own terms.

Kay was appointed Scotland’s national poet — the Scots Makar — in 2016. Her poetry collections include The Adoption Papers (1991), her memoir is Red Dust Road (2010), and her short story collection Wish I Was Here (2006) is excellent.

Trumpet is a beautiful, quietly radical novel.

“People don’t understand about identity. They think identity is about being who you are. It’s actually about being who you become.”

24. Janice Galloway (b. 1955)

Janice Galloway was born in Saltcoats, Ayrshire, in 1955. Her debut novel, The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989), was a landmark of Scottish fiction — an experimental, formally inventive novel about a drama teacher named Joy Stone who is having a nervous breakdown after the death of her married lover. The text itself reflects Joy’s fragmented mental state: margins shrink, sentences break apart, footnotes and lists interrupt the narrative.

Galloway followed it with Foreign Parts (1994), about two Scottish women on a disastrous holiday in France, and Clara (2002), a novel about the life of the pianist Clara Schumann. Her two memoirs — This Is Not About Me (2008) and All Made Up (2011) — are raw, unflinching accounts of growing up in a violent, impoverished household in working-class Scotland.

Galloway’s work is formally brave and emotionally devastating. She deserves a wider readership.

The Trick is to Keep Breathing is her essential work.

“Surviving is the main thing. Getting through it all.”

25. Dame Diana Gabaldon (b. 1952)

Though Diana Gabaldon herself is American — born in Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1952 — her Outlander series is so deeply embedded in Scottish history and culture that no list of Scottish literature would be complete without it. The series, which began with Outlander in 1991, follows Claire Randall, a World War II nurse who is transported back in time from 1945 to 1743 Scotland, where she becomes entangled in the Jacobite risings and falls in love with Highland warrior Jamie Fraser.

The series now spans nine main novels and multiple companion works. Gabaldon’s research into 18th-century Scottish history, Gaelic language, and Highland culture is extraordinarily detailed, and the books blend romance, historical fiction, adventure, and science fiction in a way that has attracted a passionate global readership. The Starz television adaptation, which ran from 2014 to 2023, brought millions more readers to the books and significantly boosted tourism to Scottish historical sites.

Outlander is a sprawling, immersive reading experience.

“When I am with you, I am at home.”

Scottish literature punches far above its weight. From Burns’s songs to Stuart’s Booker Prize-winning prose, from Conan Doyle’s detective fiction to Welsh’s council-estate brutalism, this is a literary tradition that has never been afraid to experiment, provoke, and tell uncomfortable truths. If you’re looking to expand your reading beyond Scotland, explore our lists of the best British authors, the best Irish authors of all time, and the best Australian authors.