New authorised biography of Lewis Grassic Gibbon

The Herald Scotland

22-04-2025

The popular acclaim of James Leslie Mitchell has risen exponentially in the 21st century, with his critical standing in European literature now assured.
This is the first full critical biography, authorised by his family, of the author, who found enduring fame by his pen-name of Lewis Grassic Gibbon, universally heralded for the plangent autofictional novel Sunset Song and for the epic trilogy of modern Scotland, A Scots Quair.
A native of Speyside, William Malcolm has devoted his career as teacher and academic to the promotion of Scottish literature. His lifelong passion for Mitchell/Gibbon has produced three critical studies, from publication of his Ph.D. study in 1984, as well as scholarly editions of Lewis Grassic Gibbon: The Reader and of Gibbon's masterpiece, Sunset Song, for Penguin Classics.
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Appointed an Honorary Fellow of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies in 2017, Dr Malcolm's privileged position as literary adviser to the Grassic Gibbon Centre and joint administrator of the Mitchell Literary Estate has granted him unique insight to Mitchell's life and work.
The culmination of forty years of dedicated research, this volume represents the realisation of the author's long-standing pledge to the Mitchell family to provide an intimate and rounded portrait of the man behind the legacy.
Drawing on a wealth of fresh evidence from public and private sources, History of a Revoluter is "the riveting narrative of the social, physical and emotional hardships that Leslie Mitchell had to overcome in order to achieve literary success, abruptly cut short by his early death".
Set against the turbulence of the early decades of the 20th century, Mitchell's story traces the complex conditions that forged a uniquely passionate personality whose writings have won unparalleled popular resonance, and whose keen humanitarian appeal has never been so compelling.
Scottish novelist James Robertson said: 'This account of the life and work of one of Scotland's greatest modern writers must be the benchmark against which all future studies of James Leslie Mitchell/Lewis Grassic Gibbon are measured.
"Wide-ranging yet packed with detail, it leaves no stone unturned in exploring the origins of Mitchell's genius and charting how in his short life he was able to write so much, so well, on so many different subjects and, in his Scots Quair trilogy, create an enduring and much-loved masterpiece.'