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The Award

A Prestigious National Environmental Literary Award

The Robin Jenkins Literary Award is a prestigious national writing award designed

• To celebrate the life and work of a writer who is widely considered to be Scotland’s greatest contemporary writer. (In 2003 Jenkins was given the Saltire Society Lifetime Achievement Award.)
• To highlight Jenkins’ wartime connection with forestry and its influence on his writing.
• To promote new Scottish writing that draws and builds on Scotland’s cultural heritage using our unique environmental assets, in particular trees and forestry, as key elements in submissions.
• To further associate a great writer with the Cowal Peninsula, where he lived, and taught, and from which he drew inspiration.

About the Award

The Robin Jenkins Literary Award will be for £5,000. The Award is for a work of either fiction or non-fiction and should be a book length submission. The guideline length is 90,000 to 100.000 words.

It is a condition of the Award that entries must have the environment, trees and forestry in Scotland as a key theme or setting. Your work does not need to be entirely set in Scotland. It can be a biography, environmental or wildlife study, historical account or a work of fiction, as long as it can be clearly referenced to the key theme.

Works published within the last 2 years are eligible as are unpublished manuscripts and new writing as long as they meet the criteria. Entries will be accepted from anyone resident in Scotland, born in Scotland, those with Scottish ancestry, or anyone with an interest in Scotland and Scottish culture.

Those shortlisted should be available to attend the Award event, likely to be in August 2011, at which the winner will be announced.

The decision of the judging panel will be final.

The Judging Panel 2009

Brian Morton

Brian Morton grew up in Dunoon, where Robin Jenkins was one of his English teachers. He is a former academic, journalist, and broadcaster who nowadays combines writing with small farming and garden design. After thirty years away, he once again lives in Cowal, close to Jenkins' last home.

Alan Taylor

Alan Taylor is Associate Editor of the Sunday Herald and Editor of The Scottish Review of Books. He was formerly Managing Editor of Scotsman Publciations, Deputy Editor of The Scotsman and Features and Literary Editor of Scotland on Sunday. He has made many radio and television programmes and for the last ten years he has been half of the Scottish team on Radio Four's Round Britain Quiz. He is the co-editor of two bestselling anthologies of diarists, The Assassin's Cloak and The Secret Annexe.

Isobel Murray

Isobel Murray is retired from teaching English (and Scottish) literature at Aberdeen University, where she pioneered the Writers in Residence scheme. She is now an Honorary Research Professor in modern Scottish literature. She reviewed new fiction for The Financial Times for fourteen years, and has reviewed for many Scottish papers and magazines. She has done a series of in depth interviews with Scottish writers, and has written widely on Scottish fiction, especially Jessie Kesson, Naomi Mitchison and Robin Jenkins. She served on the Saltire Literary Award panel for many years. She is currently writing about how Scottish novelists treated the Second World War.

Katie Wood

Katie Wood is a journalist and travel writer and holds a fellowship from the Royal Geographical Society. A former Travel Editor of three national newspapers she is the author of 39 travel guides. She lives in Perthshire.