A glittering shortlist is unveiled today (Thursday 8 June 2006) for this year’s Scottish Book of the Year. At £10,000 it is the biggest prize specifically for Scottish writing, and this year all three shortlisted writers are already award-winners. Ali Smith’s The Accidental won last year’s Whitbread Novel Award; James Meek has just won the Ondaatje Award for The People’s Act of Love; and Kathleen Jamie, author of Findings - won last year’s Scottish Book of the Year with her poetry collection The Tree House.

The judges this year are Meaghan Delahunt (a former Book Award winner with her first novel, In The Blue House), Dr Robyn Marsack, Director of the Scottish Poetry Library, and Dr Gavin Wallace, Head of Literature at the Scottish Arts Council, who said, “This is one of the strongest shortlists of any recent literary prize, with three books of formidable intelligence, imagination and originality, a wonderfully contrasting trio that sings out the bravado and maturity of contemporary Scottish writing.”

Meaghan Delahunt said, “Kathleen Jamie's Findings shows us how to look deeply and differently at the world around us. This is Scotland presented with an oblique eye and a true ear, rendered in tender, tough, lyrical prose. It combines the personal and the universal without sentimentality. This book, like her poetry, touches you at a cellular level. You put it down conscious that your relationship with both urban and rural landscapes, with your street and your back green have fundamentally altered.”

Robyn Marsack said of The Accidental: “In this brilliant, playful and poignant novel, Ali Smith sets a stranger in the midst of a dysfunctional family, and lets her loose to unsettle each of their lives. Sometimes the result is misery, sometimes joy; sometimes liberating, sometimes inhibiting; it is always unpredictable. The social and political context for this summer of change is recognisable, but its boundaries are blurred by a cinematic history that is also part of the story. Nothing is certain in The Accidental, except perhaps the heat, the steady current of sex, and the compelling quality of Ali Smith's prose.”

Gavin Wallace described The People’s Act of Love as “a novel of extraordinary ambition and imaginative compass, carving out whole swathes of the trauma that was Russia and Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century. Meek’s magisterial powers of realisation – of both character and place – are matched by a narrative of great intensity and drive, comparable only with giants of Russian fiction. In terms of contemporary fiction by Scottish writers, this novel is equally a daring ‘act’ of emancipation.”

All three writers win £2,000 Scottish Arts Council Book Awards, and the overall winner of the Scottish Book of the Year Award will be announced at a public award ceremony hosted by Richard Holloway, Chair of the Scottish Arts Council, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Saturday 19 August 2006.