Colin McIlroy, manuscripts curator at the National Library of Scotland, on the launch of a new fundraising appeal to open up access to a “treasure trove” of personal archives kept by three of Scotland’s leading writers
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 I'm Colin McIlroy. I'm the curator of modern literary manuscripts here at the National
00:06 Library of Scotland. We're looking at some of our recently acquired archival material.
00:11 This is correspondence of George Mackay Brown from 1994 to 1995. We're working on cataloguing
00:20 that at the moment. This was stored in Orkney and it's arrived in polybags, although this particular
00:30 batch has been alphabetised so that's useful for us when it comes to sorting it. It's mostly
00:39 incoming letters to George from friends, academics, other poets. For example, there's a letter here
00:45 from Ted Hughes who is replying to an invitation for the Orkney Festival and saying he's really
00:53 looking forward to it. What we're hoping to do through our annual appeal is to raise enough money
01:00 to have someone to work on cataloguing all of this material so we can make it available to the
01:04 public with a list. So it's not just George Mackay Brown, there's various other writers you hope to
01:09 do the same with? Yes, there's other modern writers, for example James Kelman, Alastair Gray,
01:15 and other collections we have include Naomi Mitchison and we also have Tom Leonard's
01:22 material. There's lots of great writers we've acquired that we're looking to catalog.
01:27 If the appeal is successful, what would you be able to do that you're not able to do
01:31 at the moment? Tell us a bit more about that. Sure, not only would it then be much easier for
01:38 all of our readers to come in and navigate their way through the collections, but once we know in
01:43 detail what these collections contain we can then do exhibitions, we can make material part of
01:49 public programs, allow greater access and really kind of highlight what these collections contain.
01:57 What kind of things are we talking about that writers donate? Well certainly
02:04 we've got correspondence here, we have original manuscripts, some of George's letters
02:13 will contain acrostic poems for birthdays to certain friends or poems that he'll be sending
02:21 to people. With James Kelman's archive we have drafts of all of his literary work, short stories,
02:28 plays, novels, the latest novel we have there, and research as well as correspondence as well as
02:36 contextual material that shows the life of a writer, visiting book festivals, being invited
02:41 to places, being asked to provide whether it's reviews or articles. So it's the kind of,
02:48 depending on which writer, it can be the full gamut of the writing experience or it can be a
02:52 specific part. Some writers will give us material only related to their work, others will give
02:59 biographic material relating to their entire life, so it just depends on each individual writer.
03:04 So you've had a lot of interest in previous exhibitions of material held by Ian Rankin
03:12 and Muriel Spark, are you hoping that you'll be able to do more exhibitions in the future of that
03:15 nature? Ideally yes, I mean all of the literary collections and all the writers of interest,
03:22 we would hope that we can make that material highlighted, whether it's in exhibitions or
03:27 you know online features, and just give people a really good idea of just the depth and range of
03:36 what's included in these wonderful collections. It's not just the sort of iterative process,
03:43 the creative workings of a writer, it's also contextual material which shows their influences,
03:51 how their writing goes from idea to final published edition, and as I say some of them
03:58 include material relating to biographic material relating to themselves, their families,
04:03 so it's a kind of broad spectrum.
04:08 [Music]