Scottish writing culture loves a particular kind of “grit”, the loud kind. Men with hangovers. Cynicism as personality. Violence as proof. Anything quieter gets patted on the head and shoved into the “nice” drawer, as if clarity and emotional reach are signs of weakness. That sorting is lazy, and it misses what Michelle Sloan is actually doing.
Sloan’s grit is the real kind. Domestic. Intergenerational. The kind that doesn’t announce itself because it’s too busy keeping people alive, keeping families stitched together, keeping history from swallowing the present whole. She writes across children’s books, teen fiction, and adult novels, and the point is not range for its own sake. The point is pressure. She understands how stories travel through age, class, and time, and she builds her books to carry that weight.
People sneer at children’s writing because they think simplicity is the enemy of seriousness. Sloan’s picture book The Fourth Bonniest Baby in Dundee makes that snobbery look ridiculous. It’s funny, sharp, and socially observant, and it does what good Scottish storytelling has always done: it makes a community legible without sanding off the mess. Family pride, status anxiety, competitiveness, affection, the everyday politics of who gets admired and why. That is not fluff. That is training in how power works, served early and clean.
Then she writes The Revenge of Tirpitz under M.L. Sloan and shows she can do pace without dumbing anything down. Wartime Norway, espionage, a modern thread in Shetland, and the insistence that the past is not dead content, it’s an active force. Teen fiction like this is constantly underestimated by adults who want to pretend young readers cannot handle complexity. They can. Sloan knows it. She gives them consequence, not patronising uplift.
Scotland keeps mistaking volume for truth, then acting surprised when the loudest stories turn out to be shallow.
Her adult novels sharpen the politics rather than softening them. The Edinburgh Skating Club takes a time shift structure and uses it to expose how a city like Edinburgh builds its myths. Art, provenance, clubs, male institutions performing refinement while women get treated as decorative or invisible. Sloan doesn’t just “add women back in” like a museum correction. She shows how the omission happens and why it serves the people already holding the pen. The point is not that women were overlooked. The point is that overlooking them was a system.
And Mrs Burke & Mrs Hare is the move that should end any remaining assumption that Sloan is “gentle”. She takes one of Edinburgh’s favourite gruesome legends and drags the women out of the shadow of male notoriety. Not to absolve them. Not to make them saints. To show the real ugliness of survival inside poverty, coercion, complicity, and public scapegoating. It’s a refusal to keep letting famous men dominate the story even when the story is murder. That’s not tasteful. That’s correct.
Here’s the side I’m on. Michelle Sloan is doing more for Scottish storytelling than a lot of louder, more fashionable writers who get praised for “edge” while recycling the same masculinity myths in different jackets. Her work is politically alert without chanting, emotionally precise without begging, and structurally clever without turning into a puzzle box for gatekeepers.
The quiet grit in Sloan’s work is not softness. It’s stamina, the kind literature needs when it stops performing and starts telling the truth.
If Scottish literary culture wants to take itself seriously, it needs to stop treating cross-generational storytelling as a lesser art. Sloan writes the connective tissue: how history reaches forward, how families carry consequences, how women get edited out, how institutions pretend innocence, how ordinary lives absorb the damage and keep moving. That’s the country. That’s the literature. And if that doesn’t get called grit because nobody’s bleeding in chapter one, then the definition is broken, not the writing.
