Scotland on Sunday’s literary editor, Stuart Kelly, is in the running for one of the UK's most prestigious book competitions, the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction, worth £20,000 to the winning author.
A book by Kelly on Sir Walter Scott – 'Scott-Land; The Man Who Invented a Nation' – is on the long list for the prize, with the winner to be announced on July 6.
By one of these strange co-incidences, as his paper carried a news story reporting on Kelly's initial success, in this week’s Scotland on Sunday Review supplement, sitting next to a book review by Kelly, is an interview by Lee Randall with former Daily Telegraph literary editor, Sam Leith, on his first novel – ‘The Coincidence Engine’.
It allowed Leith to recount to Randall a neat anecdote which must have brought a wry smile from Kelly. Recalled Leith: “A journalist friend who asked me to write on the subject of literary editors who write novels said, ‘You’re not really a poacher turned gamekeeper, you are more like a gamekeeper turned pheasant.’”
