Bob Tait

[close] Bob Tait was a Scottish intellectual. He was born and brought up in Kilmarnock and educated at Glasgow University, where he took a first in Philosophy. In 1968, at the height of the student “revolution” and anti-war movement, he founded the magazine Scottish International.

In March 1973, at the peak of the magazine’s influence, Tait inspired and organised a high-level conference, What Kind of Scotland?, at Edinburgh University’s theatre. A highlight was the first public performance of John McGrath’s The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black Black Oil, a radical form of political theatre as ceilidh which the 7:84 Company then toured around the Highlands and Islands.

In 1976, Tait married Isobel Murray, later Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen. They later co-authored Ten Modern Scottish Novels (1984) and did a series of in-depth interviews that led to four volumes of Scottish Writers Talking. The interviewees read like a galaxy of Scottish literary talent: Jessie Kesson (subject of a separate biography by Isobel), George Mackay Brown, Ali Smith, Norman MacCaig and Naomi Mitchison.