‘Nothing less than a 256-page argument for St Andrews as one of the brightest suns in the Scottish literary universe.’ – The Scotsman
’A delectable box of treats’ - T.C. Smout, Scottish Review of Books
This anthology of imaginative writing is arranged like St Andrews itself, where you can find an Art Deco cinema, a late medieval spire, and a 1970s residential block all on the same street.
The Book of St Andrews juxtaposes poems, stories and memoirs with scant regard to chronological order, but in the confidence that each contribution, lively in its own right, may also enhance the others. The anthology, like the town, contains golfers, kids from the caravan site, students and professors, born Fifers and visitors from near and far parts of the planet. Some contributors live and work in St Andrews; others passed through some time ago; one or two, like Homer or St Andrew, never saw the place, but are linked to it regardless.
Here are specially written stories by Meaghan Delahunt, A. L. Kennedy, and Sarah Hall; new poems by Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and Don Paterson; memoirs by Kay Redfield Jamison and Ian Rankin.
Robert Crawford is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature in the School of English at the University of St Andrews. His seven collections of poems include A Scottish Assembly (Chatto & Windus, 1990), Selected Poems (Cape, 2005) and Apollos of the North (Birlinn, 2006), which featured his English translations alongside poems in Latin by George Buchanan and Arthur Johnston. With Mick Imlah he is co-editor of The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (2000), while his prose books include The Modern Poet (Oxford University Press, 2001). He lives in St Andrews with his wife and two children.
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