Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic novel Sunset Song has been voted Scotland’s favourite novel, beating titles including JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter story to the top spot.
A public vote conducted in August by BBC Scotland, together with the Scottish Book Trust and the Scottish Library and Information Council, offered readers the chance to choose their favourite of 30 well-known novels by writers born or based in Scotland, as selected by a panel of literary experts. Titles by some of Scotland’s biggest contemporary authors, including Rowling, Val McDermid, Jackie Kay and Michel Faber, were pitted against classic works by the likes of Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Buchan and Arthur Conan Doyle, but Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 elegy to crofting, the first part of his trilogy A Scots Quair, emerged triumphant.
Iain Banks’s black comedy The Wasp Factory came second, followed by Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps and Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was in sixth place.
Grassic Gibbon’s story of Chris Guthrie, a girl growing up in the village of Kinraddie in the Mearns, was also the personal choice of Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon, who told the BBC that the novel “resonated with me first of all because it’s a wonderful story, beautifully written, but it also said something about the history of the country I grew up in and resonated very strongly with me as a young Scottish woman”.
Sturgeon described Sunset Song as “a very early feminist novel”, whose “themes are timeless to this day”.
“She’s just a very, very strong character, at a time … when not many books would have portrayed a female character in that way,” she told the BBC. “He did something quite innovative and groundbreaking in that he used his own language in a fictional setting. That was for me part of the mystique and magic of the book ... it opened my eyes to parts of the country which I hadn’t until that point been very familiar with.” The novel was also voted the “best Scottish book of all time” in a 2005 poll.
Seventh place in the new poll went to Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, eighth to Ian Rankin’s Knots & Crosses, ninth to Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and 10th to James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.
