This year's annual appeal spotlights the intriguing collections of Scotland's foremost modern writers.
We want to help you explore them and we need your support to make that possible.
The National Library of Scotland is home to the archives of some of Scotland's best-known writers. We've acquired the fascinating papers of literature greats Alasdair Gray, James Kelman and George Mackay Brown. They will sit alongside the papers of Muriel Spark, Agnes Owens and William McIlvanney in the national collections.
Manuscripts curator Colin McIlroy examining the contents of a writers' archive. Photo by Alison Gibson.
These archives consist of pocketbooks, sketches, publisher revisions, corrected proofs and unpublished material. They offer unfiltered insight into these writers’ creative processes and everyday life.
We need to catalogue and curate them, so that fans, future writers and researchers can access and explore them. Cataloguing is a large and often invisible job. Sir Ian Rankin agrees, knowing "first-hand how a skilled cataloguer can create order from a chaos of files, folders and scraps of paper."
We're launching this year's annual appeal to raise the funds needed to organise and list these fascinating archives. We hope to connect readers to the lives, minds and works of their favourite writers. Please support us if you can.