Stevie Marsden. Prizing Scottish Literature: A Cultural History of the Saltire Society Literary Awards. London: Anthem Press, 2021. 250 pages. ISBN 9781785274817. US $125 (hardcover).
At the end of July, the Booker Prize published its 2024 longlist. As Britain’s top literary prize, Booker announcements tend to stir up controversies. One such polemic involved the writer Kevin Williamson, who accused the institution of what he called “anti-Scottish racism” in 2012, citing the absence of Scottish writers among the list of winners. It was not until 2020 that a Scot would receive a Booker for the second time in the prize’s history, a whopping twenty-six years after James Kelman’s win in 1994. In total, the Booker jury has nominated fifteen Scottish authors over fifty-five years. But who should prize Scottish literature, anyway? Should Scottish literature be understood as separate from British literature and deserving of its own institutions? Or does it fall under the purview of British awards? Does the reliance of Scottish writers on British institutions for recognition reveal a lasting English cultural hegemony over Scottish literary production? French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu raised similar questions in the 1980s about Belgian literature given Belgian writers’ reliance on Parisian institutions for literary recognition. Belgian writers possessed all sorts of national literary institutions including publishing houses and journals, but they lacked their own consecrating institutions such as prestigious prizes (Pierre Bourdieu, “Existe-t-il une littérature belge? Limites d’un champ et frontières politiques,” Études de Lettres, Dec 1985, pp. 3‑6).
Stevie Marsden’s Prizing Scottish Literature takes up a similar reflection by zooming in on one of Scotland’s oldest literary awards, which is granted by the Saltire Society. Marsden skillfully pieces together the history of the society, which formed in 1936 amid the rise of Scottish nationalism—a period wherein the movement recruited culture and in particular literature to give shape to a distinct national identity. Marsden tells the story of how the institution imagined its literary awards as contributing to understandings of “Scottishness” at a time when it was important to demarcate Scottish literature as separate from and equal to British literature. Despite the book’s emphasis on this little-known Scottish prize, Marsden’s case study serves as a useful point of comparison for scholars interested in how writers from peripheral and dominated nations achieve recognition.
Marsden’s monograph responds to a gap she identifies in UK literary prize scholarship: the shortage of work on Scottish literary prizes and on the Saltire Society. The book also responds to a Booker monopoly she observes within research on UK prize culture. She critiques this tendency among “Booker-centric studies” (p. 2) to focus single-mindedly on the Booker Prize and “exceptionalise some prizes over others” (p. 166). This, she argues, does much to “contribute to the cultural dominance of a few institutions,” “impede[s] acquiring a full understanding of how all kinds of literary prizes function within a literary marketplace,” and ultimately “perpetuates a literary award hierarchy” (p. 166). Instead, she stresses the importance of research on “‘smaller,’ seemingly niche or provincial awards” (p. 171) that impact neither sales nor benefit from media coverage. Marsden offers a close reading of an admittedly obscure award as a way to “challenge current understandings of how literary award culture functions” (p. 145).
In this way, the book can help scholars think through other cultural contexts beyond Scotland, because of the original methodological approach Marsden proposes for those studying prize culture. Take for example France, a country with thousands of annual, minor literary prizes that go unstudied while the Prix Goncourt is the subject of countless research articles and books. Although Prizing Scottish Literature foremost concerns specialists of Scottish and British literary culture, it offers valuable insights and methodological tools to scholars working on other national and linguistic contexts.
While researching this institution and its prizes, Marsden also worked as one of the administrators of the Saltire Society awards, taking minutes of jury meetings and corresponding with publishers. This compelling aspect of Marsden’s work deserves much more space within the book. Rarely do researchers have access to the inner workings of literary prizes and Marsden’s insider position could have allowed her to conduct more of an ethnography, or at the very least, would have benefitted from deeper analysis of her experience as a participant observer.
Madeline Bedecarré, Davidson College
