'Scottification' puts Scotland's literature in peril, claims author

Kirsty Gunn has written of her fears of over-politicisation damaging creativity, due to arts funder Creative Scotland’s emphasis on work benefiting Scotland

The author Kirsty Gunn warned yesterday that Scotland’s literature “has never been in such peril”, blaming funding body Creative Scotland for an “unofficial politicising of literature”.

Writing in Saturday’s Scotsman, Gunn, an award-winning novelist and professor at Dundee University, claimed that the “creative atmosphere” in Scotland is “changing”, with the Scottish National Party running “a whole host of institutions and outposts and advisory bodies that are hell-bent on defining exactly just what Scotland’s culture is and should be”.

We need to be alert now to the tap-tap-tap of the bureaucrats’ computer keys telling us what to write and how

There is an agenda of promoting a bullshit ‘Scottishness’ which excludes most of the people who happen to live here

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