Grampian Hairst: An Anthology of Northeast Prose

by William Donaldson (Editor), Douglas Young (Editor), William Alexander (Contributor)

The prose extracts in Grampian Hairst are from works, chiefly fictional, dating in the main from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present. The passages are grouped around a number of central themes: The Life of the Land; The Life of the Sea; City, Town and Village; Mountain and Moorland; Shod Again for School: A Man and a Maid; and The Social Hour.

It includes The Gowk, a previously unpublished short story by Jessie Kesson, and an appendix by David Murison entitled Northeast Scots as a Literary Language.

206 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1981

About the author

William Donaldson is a graduate of the University of Aberdeen (M.A., Ph.D.) and worked for twenty five years with Britain’s Open University before becoming a visiting lecturer at M.I.T. in 2010. He has written on the political song culture of the Scottish Jacobites, tracing the creation of the semi-mythical figure “Bonnie Prince Charlie”. He pioneered the use of newspaper sources to study the popular culture of Victorian Scotland and in particular its use of vernacular Scots to deal with the whole range of the contemporary world. He has written also in the field of traditional music, being author of two books on the music and history of the Highland bagpipe.

He is the author of several prize-winning books: Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland (Aberdeen 1986) which won the Blackwell Prize; The Jacobite Song (Aberdeen, 1988) which won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and was runner-up for the Folklore Society’s Katherine Briggs Memorial Prize; and The Highland Pipe and Scottish Society (Edinburgh, 2000, with later editions 2008, 2013) which was voted joint Research Book of the Year by the Saltire Society.