No room for originality

For the sake of my sanity, and the ability to continue working as a writer who has to live in Scotland, I gave up reading on issues around contemporary literature a while ago. The current one (your report, 5 May) drew my attention because my own publisher, one of Scotland and the UK's finest, is under attack. It does not surprise me. Originality and genuine creativity are not required in this country. It follows that those who support such things will not be assisted wholeheartedly

The kind of publishing grants that allow publishers the freedom to choose their projects will be curtailed. They will be deemed unreliable, untrustworthy, difficult, perverse, too individualistic and so on. One-off projects only will be funded. More committees will be set up to audit and audition these projects which can then be "approved", as the politicians and bureaucrats say; the rest of us say controlled.

The bureaucrats in control of the funds may enjoy originality and creativity at a personal level but will have little interest in such art professionally, which is tricky to quantify and justify to those who supply the funds. It requires courage, especially because those who supply the funds are the bureaucrats' employers.

This is why their primary interest seems to be ensuring the conditions by which their salaries are secured. Usually that means strengthening the foundations of their own department, then increasing their departmental revenue. The actual funding of literary art and those who support it comes a poor third.

One thing that drew me to return to a Scottish publisher was the publishing list at Birlinn. Such a list could not exist without courage, commitment and a fundamental love of Scottish literature. It does not surprise me that the Scottish literary establishment are withdrawing the conditions that allow for that.

I always know I am back in this country when it dawns on me that I am being squeezed out of earning a living.

JAMES KELMAN

c/o Birlinn Publishing

Edinburgh