Paper Thistle Author Insights

Author Insight: Lewis Grassic Gibbon bending English into Scots rhythm and making the language question hurt

Gibbon doesn’t garnish English with Scots; he drags English through Scots rhythm until it limps.[...]

Author Insight: Sally Magnusson writing history like live reporting—clear-eyed and allergic to sentiment

Magnusson won’t perfume history for your comfort. She writes raids, clearances, and “progress” as logistics[...]

Author Insight: How Chris Brookmyre guts the heroic-investigator myth and leaves the mess on the page.

Crime fiction sells the lone investigator as a moral detergent: wade into filth, come out[...]

Author Insight: Sofia Slater writing Scotland without the postcard gloss the market keeps begging for

The market begs for Scotland as a product: mist, whisky, a tasteful bit of menace.[...]

Author Insight: Why Alex Howard’s cat-eyed Edinburgh refuses the cute animal-book assembly line

The cat-book assembly line sells whiskers as therapy and calls it insight. Alex Howard refuses[...]

Author Insight: How Denzil Meyrick weaponised dark humour against cosy-crime comfort

Cosy crime sells death as a puzzle and community as a warm blanket. Meyrick tears[...]

Author Insight: How Elizabeth May twists steampunk swagger and court intrigue until the tropes squeal

May takes steampunk’s brass swagger and court intrigue’s silk rot and tightens the screws until[...]

Author Insight: Kate Foster tearing up the heritage genre and leaving the stitches visible

Heritage fiction wants the past behind glass. Kate Foster smashes the case, drags the evidence[...]

Author Insight: Michael J Malone’s evolution from poems to cathartic crime-terrain

Malone didn’t trade poems for plot; he weaponised compression. The lines are cut to bone,[...]

Author Insight: T. L. Huchu: Zimbabwean myth, Scottish streets, and the art of the uneasy mash-up

T. L. Huchu threads Zimbabwean myth through Edinburgh without sanding either side down. In The[...]