Congratulations to Robert Crawford on winning the Saltire Society’s book of the year award and commiserations to my friend Alison Lang on not winning the first book award.

News of the results is surprisingly hard to come by, with rather scant information in the BBC online report and naething ava on the Saltire Society’s own site. However, I’ve realised that, pace my earlier fulmination, there were two poetry books on the Homecoming award shortlist: Heaney’s Henryson and Jackie Kay’s The Lamplighter. Stupid of me to overlook that. My apologies to both writers, not that I expect they’ll have been reading my comments anyway!

Still, it doesn’t really affect my point about the main prizes, especially given that the Homecoming award was for this year only. In fact, it causes equal chagrin that poetry was shunted into a one-off prize, no matter how high profile said prize was supposed to be. What does this say about the value that Scotland’s literary culture places on poetry?