Emergent taxonomy of literary genres in Scots writing

In which we analyse the popular genres of Scots writing, and then list all the the adult fiction books we've found

When I first started collecting books written in Scots, and set up a list on the Scots Wikipedia, there were only a dozen or so titles to start with. We could easy categorise them into one group “Books Written in Scots”.

As the list became longer, we were able to discern a more nuanced set of categories - “Poetry”, “Childrens”, “Fiction”. These categories emerge only because there were two or more books that happen to fall into the category.

English prose literature can be divided into a different numbers of genres. It makes it easy to manage large piles of books in libraries, bookshops and bedrooms.

My local Waterstones has adult fiction divided into “Fiction”, “Sci-fi and Fantasy”, “Horror”. My local library has “Adult fiction” and “Crime and Thrillers”. The choice of genres is down to the curator. But no curator has empty shelves, with labels but no books, hoping in vain that someone will publish something that could be housed on the shelf.

Amazon, arguably the largest bookseller, has a mind-bogglingly long range of genres, probably more than a thousand, that its books are categorised into, with micro-nuances - “Historical Scottish Romance”, “Paranormal Romance”, etc.

The Scots booklist

My most recent list of books written in Scots, contains over 1,300 titles.

Lets break it down:-

• 494 (37.8%) are books where I am pretty certain if they are wholly written in Scots, or just Scots with English narrative, or a mix of English and Scots

• 812 (62.2%) are books where I haven’t eyeballed it, and I don’t know what style of Scots is used, but the National Library of Scotland’s catalogue reckons its got Scots in it

Lets only focus on the 494 :-

• 375 (75.9%) are written wholly in Scots

• 64 (12.9%) are reference books with Scots words and English definitions

• 26 (5.3%) are anthologies with roughly equal number of Scots and English pieces

• 20 (4.0%) have Scots dialog and English narrative

• 9 (1.8%) are some other category (colouring books for example)

We can divide these 494 into some general genres:-

• 134 (27.1%) children’s

• 99 (20.0%) adult prose

• 75 (15.2%) adult poetry

• 59 (11.9%) reference and grammar

• 27 (5.5%) religious texts

• 18 (3.6%) comics and graphic novels

• 13 (2.6%) novelty (slang dictionaries, colouring books, etc)

• 11 (2.2%) theatrical scripts

• 58 (11.7%) haven’t categorised yet

I’m an adult and I like prose more than poetry, so I’m going to focus on Adult prose, breaking it down into four categories

• 75 adult fiction

• 14 young adult

• 7 bibliography

• 3 adult non-fiction

We might be inclined to combine adult fiction and young adult into a single pile. Its this category that most interests me, as an adult, who isn’t too fussed about poetry. This count of 89 fiction titles isn’t very many compared to the thousands of English language adult fiction books that a typical library branch holds.

You could spend days browsing the shelves of English adult fiction, sampling any title where the cover takes your fancy. The 89 Scots adult fiction titles is barely a single shelf - it might take a few months to read them all, but browsing would be a matter of minutes.

Individual titles

I want to look at the individual books an see what sort of subject matter genres are represented. Keep in mind the phrase “If you liked Trainspotting, you’ll love…” Not all books written in Scots are like Trainspotting. The Scots translation of HG Well’s “The Time Machine” is not like Trainspotting, but Peter Bennett’s “Liberties” is to some extent.

Even lay readers might be familiar with some of these titles - “Animal Fairm”, “The War of the Warlds” and “The Inveesible Chiel”, these books might neatly fall into a genre we might call “Translated Classics”

Indeed this “Translated Classics” genre is the most populous among Scots Adult Fiction, despite only accounting for a small proportion of sales.

Within any bookshop “Contemporary Fiction” makes up the generic majority of Adult Fiction titles, the same is true for Scots Adult Fiction, except there seems to be certain subject matter that lends itself to a specific genre - books a bit like Trainspotting, they involve drugs or petty crime or poverty or unemployment, young men with little prospects - after agonising over it for days, we might call this genre “Urban Misery”. Douglas Stuart’s “Shuggie Bain is a Booker Prize winning and best-selling example of this genre, despite being English with a few lines of Scots dialogue.

People familiar with the works of Lewis Grassic Gibbon might then accept there are similar genres of “Historical Misery” and “Rural Misery” within Scots writing.

“Light Humour” is a well-represented genre, the overheard anecdotes and stories of Allan Morrison, and perhaps “The Tales of Parahandy” if we were to consider them as Scots language writing.

“Family Saga” is the Amazon genre given to Emma Grae’s “Be Guid Tae Yer Mammy”, also in this genre would be Dianne McDowell’s “Ma’s Bairn’s” series, and possibly Jane Townsley’s “Joe’s Cloud an Ither Stuff”.

Another important but under-represented genre is “History and Myth”, which would hold Donald Smith’s “Saut & Bluid” and Ethyl Smith’s “Changed Times” series.

“Science Fiction” is represented in Scots language literature, with Matthew Fitt’s “But n Ben A-Go-Go”, Wulf Kurtoglu’s “Bracken Fences” and Iain WD Forde’s “The Paix Machine” - there might be more that I don’t know about (also Josephine Giles’s “Deep Wheel Orcadia” - but that’s poetry).

Under-represented Genres

Time Travel is well established trope in English literature, there are many English language books that could be listed in a “Time Travel” genre, in Scots I’ve found just two Sheena Blackhall’s translation of HG Wells’ “The Time Machine” and Ross Sayer’s “Daisy on the Outer Line”, the latter being the only original time travel Scots book.

“Daisy on the Outer Line” overlaps to some extent with the “Urban Misery” genre, set in Glasgow about a lass who isn’t happy with her lot in life. We might imagine Scots writers being inspired to write other similar time travel books. In “Daisy…” she only slips back in time a few weeks, rather than the epoch spanning travels of HG Wells. If other Scots time travel books appears with similar short time hops, ten minutes into the future, or back to last Friday, we might describe the genre as “Contemporary Time Travel” to make it distinct from the broader English time travel genre.

I haven’t been able to find any books that neatly fit into genres such as Romance, Fantasy, Horror (Ghosts, Vampires, Slasher, Zombie), Erotica, Thriller, Crime, Detective. There is no Scots language equivalent to Sherlock Holmes.

In Norway there is a genre called “Nordic Noir” which has its own tropes and flavours and dozens of writers. Whilst Thriller / Crime / Detective already exists as a literary genre, the Nords have made it something of their own, distinct from other nation’s Thriller / Crime / Detective literature.

In a similar manner we might image writers of Scots literature coming up with their own distinctly Scottish takes on Romance, Fantasy, Thriller, Crime, Detective and Erotica.

Competition

Personally I don’t want my writing to compete against other writers, the pie is already too small, barely 60,000 sales of books written in Scots and around fifty new releases each year.

But this presents a weird paradox. The Outlander book series has sold over 60 million copies worldwide, there is clearly a huge global market for “Historical Scottish Romance”. But there are no books in this genre written wholly in Scots. Even if just 1% of Outlander readers were inclined to read another similar books but written in Scots, it would be more sales than the entire the Scots book market.

Within Scots language writing, there are all these empty genres, where no human writers are churning out books, and no AI writers either. There is neither market nor competition. Just genre labels that served English publishing so well.

If a Scots writer wrote a Lord of the Rings / Witcher / Shannara “Fantasy” genre book in Scots, there might be a market for it. And then if GenAI came out with something similar, and the human writer had to compete against the AI for sales, it would be an injustice.

Similarly with the Thrillers / Crime / Detective genres.

But if the human writers are neglecting that specific genre, and AI was able to fill the void, would the injustice still exist? I need to be clear that I’m not saying that its okay for AI to churn out content for neglected genres.

Human creativity depends on humans. Getting AI to write genres that no one was reading anyway, is just a waste of electricity.

But by the same logic, if there is a popular genre populated by human writers, and no sign of GenAI then there’s clearly no injustice, nothing to get angry about, just a vague amorphous threat on the horizon.

Slang Dictionaries

At this point I wish to make a brief aside about slang dictionaries. I’ve analysed AI slop Scottish slang dictionaries in a previous Substack post. To some extent they have calved out a niche within the Scots dictionaries market, and compete again more legitimate Scots dictionary writers.

But whilst they exist, it isn’t their mere existence that has calved out the market share, they also have paid sponsored links. When you search for Scottish dictionaries, the poor quality novelty slang dictionaries appear as sponsored links, and that’s the main manner in which the get sales.

If they merely existed without the sponsored search results, they wouldn’t be half as popular.

I’m not sure the extent to which human Scots adult fiction writers use sponsored links and sponsored search results, but it seems to be cost-effective.

Extant genres

“Time Travel” fiction exists, represented by two titles - Ross Sayer’s “Daisy on the Outer Line” and Sheena Blackhalls’ translation of HG Well’s classic “The Time Machine” - would we consider these authors competing against each other for this segment of the market? - Hardly since The Time Machine is a free docx file on Aberdeen University’s Elphinstone Institute website.

Returning to Outlander, there was a discussion on the Scots Facebook group where the Outlander books were characterised as “tartanised soft porn”, another commentator suggested “winchin an pumpin”, whilst Amazon calls it “Scottish Historical Romance”. In the list of wholly Scots books, there doesn’t seem to be anything that I’d consider to be “Romance”, it is an unrepresented genre. Similarly there’s doesn’t seem to be any “Erotica” written in Scots.

If there were dozens of books that covered such subject matter, we might easily separate the books into two distinct genres - “Romance” and “Erotica”. But if we conceive of a situation with only one or two writers, instead of separating them into these pre-existing genres, we might lump them together with a genre title that accurately described the distinctly Scottish subject matter of the books - “Winchin an Pumpin”, in that they might be neither romantic nor erotic

Whilst someone shopping for Romance might not be entirely satisfied by a “Winchin an Pumpin” book, it would be a closer match than “Science Fiction” or “Urban Misery”. This is all beside the fact, there’s no “Winchin an Pumpin” genre books in Scots.

The Limitation of Time

A problem I face here, is not being able to read ALL THE BOOKS. Over the years I’ve made good use of the GoodReads website and whilst the quantity of 600 or so books that I’ve read in the last 46 years may be an under-estimate, it does come down to about thirteen books per year or one a month.

For short bursts I might consume literature at a rate of one book per week, but its not sustainable.

It would take me about 100 years to read all the 1,300 books on my list of Scots books, to personally ascertain what genre each one is and the extent to which it is written in Scots.

There is no alternative but to rely on other people reading the books, and somehow recommending and comparing them to other books that might be similar - “If you liked Trainspotting, you’ll love…”, “Its like a Scots version of Agatha Christie”, “The Shannara saga, but in Scots”

Where I’ve stated that here are no romance, thriller or detective books in the Scots canon, I might be wrong, I just haven’t read the books yet or if anyone else has, they have been unable to communicate their views.

Its not possible to satisfactorily search an exhaustive site like Amazon for all the books written in Scots. A large number of books are mis-categorised as English or Scottish Gaelic categorised as Scots. Goodreads and Storygraph, similarly are unsatisfactory. Its already been well-established elsewhere how poor Scottish libraries are in their knowledge and stock of Scots books. Their catalogue metadata for books written in Scots isn’t helpful and they rarely have shelves or sections of books written in Scots, the books are just dispersed thinly among English language books.

Whilst Orb’s Bookshop in Huntly is great for Doric and Scots language books, its a bit of a long way to travel for most Scots readers.

The Three Prongs

I think in order to make Scots language literature more ubiquitous a three pronged approach is required.

Its not simply the case that there aren’t enough Scots writers getting published, the problem is more nuanced than that. A year ago Len Pennie’s “Poyums” poetry collection was a best-seller, on Amazon it was selling more copies than any other poetry book in the UK. But until a few weeks ago Glasgow public libraries only had a single copy to be shared by the 150,000 people who considered themselves able to read Scots in the 2022 census.

Now with the release of the paperback edition, Glasgow’s libraries have a total of five copies, presumably these we be shared and circulated between the thirty-three library branches. Each library gets to stock a single copy for two months of the year.

In a similar manner, I regularly search Scottish library catalogues to find out what recent new acquisitions have been made. Often the search results will breathlessly announce a NEW Scots title, and then it will be some children’s translation published ten or twenty years ago, and not a new book published in the last year.

It doesn’t matter if many Scots writers are publishing many Scots books if the various stockists are refusing or unable to stock them, and pretending that dusty stock from years ago represent new acquisitions.

So, the three-pronged approach:-

1. Support and encourage writers - not merely in the hassle of getting physical books published, but also on the various free amateur online fiction sites, Archive of Our Own, ABC Tales and WattPad.

2. Demanding libraries stock the books, asking at bookshops for Scots books to be stocked, encouraging newspapers and other media to review Scots books, giving them slightly more prominence than they currently do.

3. Facilitating the backend - creating easily accessible lists of books and publishers, finding ways to improve metadata, making a fuss in the middle between Supply and Demand.

Additionally, just as courtesy, its important to cross-promote Scots writers, recommend other people’s works, and amplify reviews. Each writer has their own audience, their own circle of followers on social media, who might be sick to death of the writer’s constant promotion of their scrievings. But sharing another writer’s work to a different audience - that’s valuable and can lead to more sales and more visibility..

So, in light of this, as an appendix here’s a somewhat exhaustive list of Scots adult fiction, curated into different genres.

Appendix

A list of books written in Scots (or English narrative / Scots dialogue) by genre :-

Translated Classic

James Andrew Begg “Alison's Jants in Ferlieland”
Sheena Blackhall “Fey Case o Dr Jekyll an Mr Hyde”
Sheena Blackhall “The Inveesible Chiel”
Sheena Blackhall “Jean Eyre”
Sheena Blackhall “O Mice an Men”
Sheena Blackhall “The Time Machine”
Sheena Blackhall “Whudderin Heichts”
Sheena Blackhall “The Winnerfu Warlock o Oz”
Sheena Blackhall “The War o the Warlds”
Catherine Byrne “Alice's Mishanters in e Land o Farlies”
Thomas Clark “Alice's Adventirs in Wunnerlaun”
Thomas Clark “Animal Fairm”
Matthew Fitt “Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stane”
Sandy Fleemin “Ailice's Aventurs in Wunnerland”
Iain W. D. Forde “Traivells wi a Cuddie I the Cevennes”
Iain W. D. Forde “Traisur Insch”
Cameron Halfpenny “Ahlice's Adveenturs in Wunderlaant”
Tom Hubbard “Alice’s Advenchers in Wunnerlaund”
Laureen Johnson “Alice's Adventirs in Wonderlaand”
Andrew McCallum “Ailis's Anterins I the Laun o Ferlies”
Derrick J. McClure “Ailice's Anters in Ferlielann”
Derrick J. McClure “Throwe the Keekin-Gless an Fit Ailice Found There
Anne Morrison-Smyth “Alice's Carrants in Wunnerlan”

Contemporary Fiction

Sheena Blackhall “Minnie”
Anne Donovan “Buddha Da”
Anne Donovan “Gone are the Leaves”
Anne Donovan “Hieroglyphics And Other Stories”
Emma Grae “The Tongue She Speaks”
Gordon M. Hay “Green Corn i the Breer”
Chris McQueer “Hermit”
Chris McQueer “Hings”
Chris McQueer “HWFG”
Alison Miller “Demo”
Ian Spring “The Glasgow Effect: or The Day It Never Got Dark In Dundee”

Urban Misery

Graeme Armstrong "The Young Team"
Peter Bennett “Liberties”
Colin Burnett “Working Class State of Mind”
Colin Burnett “Who’s Aldo”
Shane Johnstone “The Gods of Frequency”
James Kelman “How Late It Was How Late”
Patrick George O’Kane “Joining the Dots: A Scottish coming of age story”
Moira McPartlin “Before Now”
Ely Percy "Duck Feet"
Irvine Welsh “Trainspotting”

Squaddies

Iain MacLachlain “This Is What You Get”
Janet Paisley “Not for Glory”

Light Humour

Willie Cromie “Doon tha Wal Raa : Ulster-Scots Crack fae Ballywalter”
Brian P. Innes “Doric For Abidy Twa”
Deborah Leslie “Doric - Hale an Hairty”
Deborah Leslie “Doric: Alive an Kickin”
Deborah Leslie “Doric: Alive an Kickin”
Allan Morrison “Dinna Fash Yersel Scotland”
Allan Morrison “Goannae no dae that”
Allan Morrison “Haud ma chips, ah've drapped the wean”
Allan Morrison “Haud ma teeth till ah tie ma lace!”
Allan Morrison “Haud That Bus”
Allan Morrison “Haud yer Wheesht”
Allan Morrison “Kerryoans up the Clyde”
Allan Morrison “Last Train Tae Auchenshuggle”
Allan Morrison “Should've Gone tae Specsavers, Ref!”
Norman Watson “Wha Bohked in the Aspadeestra”
Pete Fortune “A Pauper from Irishgait Tannery”

History and Myth

James Andrew Begg “The Man's the Gowd for A' That”
Donald Smith “Saut & Bluid”
Donald Smith “Storm & Shore”
Ethyl Smith “Changed Times”
Ethyl Smith “Dark Times”
Ethyl Smith “Desperate Times”
Ethyl Smith “Lost Times”
Ethyl Smith “Broken Times”

Family Saga

Emma Grae “Be Guid Tae Yer Mammy”
Angeline King “Dusty Bluebells”
Julie Kennedy “Ma Mum & William Wordsworth”
Diane McDowell “Drummond”
Diane McDowell “Macaulay”

Science Fiction

Matthew Fitt “But n Ben a-go-go”
Iain W. D. Forde “The Paix Machine”
Wolf Kurtoglu “Braken Fences”

Contemporary Time Travel

Ross Sayers “Daisy On The Outer Line”

…

At this point I should confess, I haven’t read all the books, as mentioned above, time is limited. Its entirely possible that I haven’t categorised all of these book appropriately. Some writers might have entirely legitimate grievances about being in “Urban Misery” or “Light Humour” when they should be in some other genre.

I apologise.

But to counter this, do writers often wander round bookshops and libraries, rearranging their stock based on their iconoclastic views? Or do they just accept that once their books are written and sent out into the world, they are outwith the author’s control, and readers are free to shift them around or critique them as they see fit. Or in the case of Scots writing, just ignore them.

Any corrections or additions would be warmly welcomed, and probably bought and added to my reading pile.