The International Literary Festival

Canada and Scotland can withstand the vicissitudes of the global book trade – if they continue to stick together.

One of the best attempts to encapsulate the enigma of Scotland’s enormous impact on the rest of the world comes from poet and critic Douglas Dunn: " ... all nations can point to their geniuses in many realms of human endeavour, but, for a country of its size, Scotland’s contribution is almost disturbing in its scale," he wrote in 1991. One might disagree with Dunn’s worried epithet, but no-one could dispute that nowhere else on the globe is that paradox of scale and influence more manifest than in the relationship between Scotland and Canada; and it is through our literatures first and foremost that we map our shared terrains, both literally and metaphorically. Scotland’s and Canada’s literary traditions are not so much "related" as almost conterminous and co-extensive, transcending the sequentiality of linear historiography. It is a condition best symbolized in Alistair MacLeod’s anecdote arising from his friendship with two of Scotland’s greatest 20th century Gaelic writers, Iain Crichton Smith and Sorley MacLean, both of whom assured him – during MacLeod’s sojourn in Scotland in the 1980s under the Scottish Arts Council’s Scottish-Canadian Fellowship – that he was as much a part of Scottish literary tradition as they were. MacLeod was nervous of the compliment, and politely demurred. "Look, you’re one of us," Crichton Smith insisted. "It’s just that you’re 250 years late!"

Innumerable historical examples testify to the reciprocal Scottish-Canadian literary heritage and identity, whether it’s the enormous impact of two of Scotland’s greatest novelists on Canadian history and society, John Galt and John Buchan – the founder of the city of Guelph in 1826, and Governor-General of Canada from 1936-40 respectively – or the legacy of Scottish, and particularly Highland, emigration from the late 18th century onwards which has scattered more Scottish names across the map of Canada than anywhere else in the world and ensured that, next to Scotland itself, parts of Canada are the main Gaelic-speaking areas of the world. More subtly, both Scottish and Canadian literature are "diasporic," deeply inscribed by the tropes of emigration, exile, displacement and loss, as defined to a huge extent by the trauma of the Highland Clearances. In both literatures, the experiences of ethnic "peripheries" in society and culture form disproportionately pervasive and powerful iconic "centres" in national consciousness, resulting from the shared condition of attempting to articulate and retrieve cultural pasts that are obscured, if not occluded, by more powerful narratives.

The huge disparities in scale and geography between Scotland and Canada are equally belied in a contemporary context by our shared predicament of inhabiting a literary culture and publishing industry that are overshadowed by a more powerful Anglophone neighbour, a situation in which a range of Canadian state interventions could offer valuable lessons to Scotland at a volatile time for the global book trade: a time of opportunity as well as threat for both countries. Together, we can benefit from the first, and avoid the second – if we stay close. Compared to the fullness and depth of understanding only our shared literatures can offer, 250 years is no more than a blink.