And the Land Lay Still by James Robertson

Initially funded by the Scottish Arts Council, Itchy Coo has proved to be a popular enterprise.

The other side of Robertson's career since circa 2000 has been Itchy Coo, a publisher of children's books in the Scots language. While Robertson's first two novels featured the Scottish past ( The Fanatic merged a story of contemporary Scotland in the months surrounding the 1997 election with a story of Scotland in the 17th century, while Joseph Knight was purely historical) he is not a historical novelist, and Gideon Mack was set in Scotland between the 1950s and the present day. His novels, therefore, feature the Scottish urban and rural landscape as prevalently as Scottish history between the 17th and 20th centuries. The Testament of Gideon Mack, meanwhile, is set in a fictitious rural village that resembles the villages of eastern Scotland bordering the Highlands between Dundee and Aberdeen where Robertson currently lives. Joseph Knight is based on the true story of a slave brought from the Caribbean to Scotland, and the novel revolves primarily around the cities of Dundee, near where Robertson was then living, and Edinburgh. Each of his three novels has been influenced to a degree by where he was living when he wrote them. His early short stories and first novel used contemporary and historical life in Edinburgh as a key theme, drawing on the fact he lived there intermittently during his PhD and during the later 1990s before moving to Fife, and subsequently Angus. Robertson had already been heavily influenced by MacDiarmid and MacDiarmid's Scots language poetry prior to this appointment. From 1993 to 1995 he was the first writer in residence at Hugh MacDiarmid's house outside Biggar, Lanarkshire. Robertson became a full-time author in the early 1990s. He was a publisher's sales rep and later worked for Waterstone's Booksellers, first as a bookseller in Edinburgh and later as assistant manager of the Glasgow branch. Robertson worked in a variety of jobs after leaving university, mainly in the book trade. He also spent an exchange year at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Educated at Glenalmond College and Edinburgh University, Robertson attained a PhD in history at Edinburgh on the novels of Walter Scott.

And the Land Lay Still by James Robertson