Readers like to immerse themselves in the locations that their favourite authors use and increasing numbers of them are visiting the places which feature in the stories they read.
If you also consider the growing trend for people to book short breaks and holidays around events staged at literary festivals like Kirkcudbright Book Week, the potential becomes clear when it comes to attracting visitors and contributing to the local economy.
To help the process, festival organiser Kirkcudbright Book Week Society has come up with a few suggestions, taken from the work of some of the authors who will feature among the many events running in the town in south-west Scotland between March 3-9, 2025.
One such event is the launch of a new edition of The Little White Town of Never Weary, a book which was written and illustrated by Kirkcudbright illustrator Jessie M. King, who was born in 1875.
The book, which has been out of copyright, consists of the description of a small town, widely assumed to be Kirkcudbright where King lived at the time, and is presented in the form of a fairy tale for children.
It was intended as a tribute to the town, where King had happily settled with her husband and daughter, and the new edition, complete with an introduction by publisher Ian Spring, is planned for release to coincide with the 150th anniversary of her birth on 20th March 2025.
We are sure that readers will enjoy exploring the town which so inspired the author, book in hand, and there are plenty of hotels, Bed and Breakfasts, guest houses and Air BnB places available in Kirkcudbright and the surrounding area if they wish to book short breaks or longer holidays.
Jessie M. King is not the only writer featured in this year’s Book Week who set stories in Dumfries and Galloway locations which can be visited by readers.
Crime writer Aline Templeton sets her DI Marjory Fleming series in Dumfries and Galloway and her website (https://alinetempleton.co.uk/) has a section explaining her approach to locations, which sees her blend fictional and real places.
For example, she says, although the towns mentioned in the series do not exist, they are set in a real landscape. Kirkluce, a market town where the Galloway Constabulary has its headquarters, is on the main road half-way between Newton Stewart and Stranraer, Knockhaven, the fishing village in The Darkness and the Deep, lies between the villages of Port William and Monteith on Luce Bay, and Drumbreck, the setting for Lying Dead, is on an inlet off Wigtown Bay.
When the police officers move about the area, their routes are described using real place names and road numbers.
Lovatt Island, the island that is almost a central character in Evil for Evil, is placed beside the Isles of Fleet in Wigtown Bay and a place that does exist is the lighthouse on the Mull of Galloway. You can even see the rock, below the cliffs to the north, where the dead girl’s body was found in Dead in the Water and Clatteringshaws Loch and Glenluce Abbey, which feature in Bad Blood, are real as well.
Also drawing on Dumfries and Galloway for inspiration is local crime writer John Dean, who bases his DCI Jack Harris series of novels in a fictional North Pennines valley but switched a sizeable proportion of the action to real places in Scotland for his two most recent books (The Girl in The Meadow and To Catch A Lie, published by The Book Folks), having moved to live near Kirkcudbright.
Settings include a gangster’s fictional house on the real hills to the north of the A75, on the stretch between Dumfries heading towards Castle Douglas, and a fictional wildfowl rescue centre in the real Ayrshire Hills. John has also set important scenes in a motorway service station on the northbound M74 and in a café on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow.
A number of the other authors who will appear at Book Week also use Scottish locations as a backdrop for their work but choose places that are further afield, with the Scottish islands proving particularly attractive to them.
For example, Penny McPherson, whose book The Colours of the Sky, the first in her historical fiction trilogy, was recently published, chose Skye for the setting, based on her long association with the island, and Donald S. Murray, a non-fiction author, novelist, poet and playwright, draws on his early years spent on the Isle of Lewis and his more recent experiences of Shetland, where he now lives.
Author Kenneth Steven, who is coming back to Kirkcudbright Book Week by popular demand after his debut last year, draws on a wide variety of Scottish locations as well, including for his recently-published book Atoms of Delight Ten Pilgrimages in Nature (In the Moment), which sees the poet and essayist take the reader through some of Scotland’s most beautiful landscapes in search of his ‘atoms of delight’ – treasures, both natural and spiritual.
In the book, he invites readers to accompany him as he seeks out crystal-clear waters, a glimpse of an elusive bird, delicate orchids, plump berries, or pebbles polished by time and tide. Appreciative of the grace of silence and the value of solitude and simplicity, he takes journeys that prompt introspection and provoke memories. Readers can derive much satisfaction from treading in his footsteps, book in hand.
Away from remote landscapes, Scotland’s main cities have also proved to be an attractive setting for some of the authors due to appear at Book Week and readers can derive much fun from taking their book out and matching the narrative with the locations which are real.
One such author is another crime writer in the form of Sara Sheridan, who selected 1820s Edinburgh for The Fair Botanists, Waterstone’s Scottish Book of the Year 2022, and 1840s Glasgow for her latest novel The Secrets of Blythswood Square.
Finally, another couple of crime writers drawing on Scottish landscapes they know well are Lynne McEwan, whose series of novels feature DI Shona Oliver and are set in Dumfries and Galloway, and May Rinaldi, who is based in Dumfries and Galloway and draws heavily on her days in Airdrie for inspiration.
X The trend towards people visiting locations from books is supported by Trip Fiction (https://www.tripfiction.com/) which provides information for people hoping to track down locations featured in books, including maps and a database that you can easily search by location, title and author.
X If you wish to find out full details of the events mentioned here, you can go to the ‘Programme’ section at the top of the home page on the Book Week website www.kirkcudbrightbookweek.org. Clicking on the ‘Tickets’ section, also at the top of the home page, will take you through to the online booking system, which is run in conjunction with Ticket Source.
