Writing Scotland is a major eight-part television series, made by Hopscotch Films, written and presented by Carl MacDougall and scheduled to be broadcast on BBC2 Scotland and BBC4 in 2004.

These long interviews with very different Scottish writers do not aim at the topical, but to produce a thoughtful window on each writer's mind and work. Recorded at intervals over sixteen years, they go at the writer's chosen pace. Writers relish them.

Liam McIlvanney provides detailed new readings of Burns’s major poems, and also offers new research on his links with Irish poets and radicals, providing a radical reinterpretation of the man who is coming to be recognised as the poet laureate of the radical Enlightenment.

Eminent poets and critics combine in unique tribute to a poet of whom even Robert Burns stood in awe.

• Literary Criticism