With the announcement of a new international literary fellowship, the Scottish Arts Council has honoured a great living Scottish writer with an initiative that will further strengthen the reputation of Scottish literature.
The Muriel Spark International Fellowship will bring international writers to live and work in Scotland for a period of up to two months.
The Scottish Arts Council is currently preparing a shortlist of writers to be considered for the inaugural Fellowship.
The Muriel Spark International Fellowship holder is expected to present master-classes and creative writing seminars, as well as undertake speaking engagements and readings at any of Scotland’s growing number of literary festivals.
With few opportunities for international writers to live and work in Scotland, the new Fellowship is aimed at strengthening the country’s growing links with writers and cultures across the globe. Scottish writers will also have the opportunity to exchange ideas and learn from a major international author. The Fellowship will build upon the increasingly cosmopolitan and international profile of literature in Scotland by providing opportunities for a cultural transfusion of ideas.
Announcing the Muriel Spark International Fellowship, Graham Berry,
Director, Scottish Arts Council said: ‘We feel it is appropriate to name this new Fellowship after a living Scottish writer, and we are delighted and honoured that Dame Muriel Spark has graciously agreed to bestow her name.
‘As Scotland’s most internationally renowned living novelist, we’re confident that this new Fellowship will win the respect and interest of the international literary community, and become a prestigious new institution for international literary and cultural exchange.’
Dame Muriel Spark also welcomed the Fellowship from her home in Italy, expressing her delight at being associated with the project. Dame Muriel will be appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival last week.
Born and brought up in Edinburgh, Dame Muriel is regarded as one of the world’s leading contemporary novelists in English and the author of one of Scotland’s greatest novels, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961).
She has published over twenty novels, as well as volumes of poetry, criticism, and biography, and an autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, published 1992. Her many novels have been translated into several languages and she has won several international literary awards, including the Prix Italia in 1962, the Prix du Meilleur Recueil de Nouvelles Etrangères in 1987, the Ingersoll Foundation T. S. Eliot Award in 1992, the Campion Award in 2001, and the Boccaccio Prize for European Literature in 2002.
The Scottish Arts Council has created a number of literary Fellowships in recent times. Others include:
• An International Creative Writing Fellowship, based at Cove Park
artistic community near Helensburgh,
• An Edwin Morgan Translation Scholarship, which will support the
attendance of a high-calibre literary translator at the six-week Creative Writing Programme of the Scottish Universities’ International Summer School
• A Latvian Writers’ Exchange, in partnership with Scotland
International PEN, which funds a visit to Scotland by a Latvian writer.
It is hoped that the first Muriel Spark International Fellowship will begin in the autumn.
