Current Brownsbank Fellow
Carl MacDougall
Carl MacDougall was born in Glasgow and spent his childhood between Kingskettle, Fortingall and Oban. He left school at 15 and worked in a variety of jobs before leaving Glasgow to spend three or four years abroad, mostly in Europe.
Back in Glasgow he worked for 10 years as a copy-taker on the Scottish Daily Express. At this time he was also heavily involved with the burgeoning folk song movement, working on the influential Chapbook magazine with Arthur Argo and Ian Philip. He left the Express, published two collections of folk tales; then he moved to Fife, where he founded and edited Words magazine, where extracts of Alasdair Gray's Lanark and stories by James Kelman and Agnes Owens first appeared.
While working in radio and television, he wrote the stories which appeared in Elvis is Dead. Since then he has written three prize-winning novels, Stone Over Water, The Lights Below and The Casanova Papers. Billy Connolly has called Carl 'a hero of mine, a great storyteller', and George Mackay Brown said 'The Lights Below is a masterpiece - one of the great Scottish novels of this century.'
Carl introduced and edited the classic anthology of Scottish short stories, The Devil and the Giro and has also written for theatre, including an award-winning adaptation of The Good Soldier Schweik and, more recently, an adaptation of Molière's Don Juan for the Highland Festival. With Douglas Gifford, he published Into a Room, the Selected Poems of William Soutar, which followed the Soutar Centenary Exhibition which he researched, wrote and devised. Painting the Forth Bridge: A Search for Scottish Identity was published by Aurum Press.
Carl recently wrote and presented Writing Scotland, an eight part series for BBC television. As well as the book of the series, he also worked on the website.