The Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club

Tonight's talk by Helen Graham on The Real Mackay: Walter Scott’s Favourite Comedian is now available to view online: https://www.walterscottclub.com/blog/the-real-mackay-walter-scotts-favourite-comedian Helen Graham

The 2024 winner of our Scottish Literary Studies Medal is Marni Robertson.
https://www.walterscottclub.com/scottish-literary-studies-medal
Marni is in the fourth year of her English Literature degree, and won the medal for her essays for the course ‘Haunted Imaginations” last year. Her first essay explored the ways in which the supernatural destabilises reality and its understood notions of time, space and form, and to what ends this is employed in Scottish folk tales and James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Her final essay analysed how a text’s treatment of the supernatural can often be seen to reflect its understanding of gender – specifically femininity – by looking at a series of texts by Scottish authors featuring female protagonists. Marni also enjoyed studying and writing on Scott’s Rob Roy on a Romanticism course, and this year will be taking a course on contemporary Scottish literature.

The 2023 winner of our Scottish Literary Studies Medal is Lauren Galligan. https://www.walterscottclub.com/scottish-literary-studies-medal
Lauren graduated in 2023 with a first-class degree in English Literature and won the prize for her Dissertation titled ‘Bodies Under Pressure’: The Constructions of Masculinities and Femininities in Contemporary Scottish Working-Class Fiction. The dissertation was a literary analysis of three examples of working-class, Scottish literature from the 20th and 21st century: Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart, The Sopranos, by Alan Warner, and Trainspotting, by Irvine Welsh. She traced the constructions of masculinities and femininities by characters in marginal class positions, using a wider framework of power and hegemony, as proposed by Raewyn Connell. The paper explored how the context of Scotland in the 1980’s and 1990’s intersected with a wider crisis of gender order to create complex layers of identity destabilisation, disorientation and marginalisation. Throughout her degree, Lauren also wrote a number of other essays exploring gender in the works of contemporary Scottish writers including James Kelman, Iain Banks, Alasdair Gray, Ali Smith and Tom Leonard.

Tonight's talk by Dr. Paul Barnaby is available to watch here: https://www.walterscottclub.com/blog/thou-with-pencil-i-with-pen-james-skenes-artistic-collaboration-with-sir-walter-scott

https://www.abdn.ac.uk/sll/research/walter-scott-research-centre/schools.php

Calling all teachers! The Walter Scott Research Centre is delighted to announce a new toolkit full of ready-to-use, engaging resources on one of the UK's most influential poets: Walter Scott. Browse the toolkit here:
https://brnw.ch/21wNpQC

Tonight's talk by Prof. Gerry Carruthers on "The Edinburgh and Borders of Sir Walter Scott and Muriel Spark" is now available to watch online: https://www.walterscottclub.com/blog/the-edinburgh-and-borders-of-sir-walter-scott-and-muriel-spark
The talk looks at how both Walter Scott and Muriel Spark engage with the ideas of the Borders and of Edinburgh. In the cases of both, these literary topographies emerge as vivid literary landscape, but are also much more uncertain than they might at first appear reflecting the wider complexity of Scotland, the world and the human condition generally.

Tickets are still available for our joint lecture with the Muriel Spark Society. Join us on Thursday 12th September for a talk by Prof. Gerry Carruthers on
“The Edinburgh and Borders of Sir Walter Scott and Muriel Spark”
https://www.walterscottclub.com/events

Videos from today Colloquium on Redgauntlet available to watch here: https://www.walterscottclub.com/blog/a-colloquium-on-redgauntlet ,

A Colloquium on Redgauntlet One of the most prestigious literary clubs in the world.

The new programme of events for the second half of the year has just been sent to Club members:

All the events of the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club Past events with videos, text and photos

On this day 130 years ago the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club came into existence: https://www.walterscottclub.com/

Tonight's talk from Eric Milligan will shortly be available to watch online: https://www.walterscottclub.com/blog/sir-walter-scott-the-greatest-of-them-all

Tonight at our AGM as a token of exceptional long service to the Club, the following quaichs were presented as a mark of esteem to:
(a) Lt. Cdr. Dairmid Gunn O.B.E, 1988-2020;
(b) Kathleen Hardie, 2004-2023;
(c) Prof. Peter Garside 2009-2024; and
(d) Ronnie Renton 2013-2023.

Our newly elected President is Lord Stewart.
He will give the Toast to Sir Walter at our 115th Annual Dinner on the 1st May 2025: https://www.walterscottclub.com/2024-lord-stewart

Prof. Penny Fielding's Toast to the Memory of Sir Walter Scott is available to watch here: https://www.walterscottclub.com/2023-penny-fielding

Gillian Hughes' talk from 2019 is now on our new website:
https://www.walterscottclub.com/blog/gillian-hughes-scotts-writing-for-the-edinburgh-stage , ,

Scott’s Writing for the Edinburgh Stage On Thursday 4th April 2019 we had a talk by Gillian Hughes. She was introduced by our Chairman, Prof Peter Garside.

Jenni Calder's talk from 2015 on Reading Waverley is now on our new website:
https://www.walterscottclub.com/blog/jenni-calder-reading-waverley , , ,

Reading Waverley One of the most prestigious literary clubs in the world.

Tonight's talk by Greg Moodie will shortly be available to watch here: https://www.walterscottclub.com/blog/greg-moodie-reimagining-scott

Just 15 tickets remaining for ‘Reimagining Scott’ by Greg Moodie on the Thursday 11th April. https://www.walterscottclub.com/events