Scotland has a rich, strong, diverse literary tradition.
It’s a lineage which touches on almost every area of Scottish life, with those tender, beautiful phrases impacting on visual arts, education, politics and even sport.
So Karine Polwart could never quite escape it’s touch. Indebted to folk music, her output to date matches an awareness of Scottish past with a deeply personal, highly emotional sensibility.
Often nakedly autobiographical, Karine Polwart’s work has won widespread critical favour. With new album ‘Traces’ out now via Hegri Music ClashMusic decided to invite the Scottish singer into Their Library…
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What is your favourite book and why?
Antoine de St Exupery’s ‘The Little Prince’. I do love the fable form and it’s such a perfect exploration of love and duty and compassion. Beautiful and tender. I bawl my eyes out every time. I’ve given this book as a gift to someone else more than any other book.
What other authors do you like?
A lot of Scottish writers I guess – George Mackay Brown, Kathleen Jamie, Ian Rankin, James Robertson, Iain (M) Banks, and Andrew O’Hagan. But also international writers with a tremendous sense of big forces at work, like Margaret Atwood, Jared Diamond, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Susan Sontag. I’m just beginning to expand my schoolgirl poetry knowledge via Don Paterson and Pablo Neruda, in particular.
What draws you to certain books?
Normally I want a contemplative book, or one that will challenge my ideas and perspective. I really love a good essay (and have covert plans to assemble a wee volume of my own) and a non fiction blockbuster. Of course, sometimes I just want to devour a fast moving story too. But I’m rarely looking for comfort I suppose. I want to feel I know the world or myself a wee bit better.
Have you ever discovered a real lost classic? What is it and why?
Alas no. Can you let me in on any secrets?
Do your literary influences have a direct impact on your songwriting?
I’m not sure. I feel I think a sense of kinship to some of my favourite writers in the way that they approach their subject matters. Often I prefer a subtle knife. But songs have such small canvasses as pieces of writing that they have to obey their own rules and dimensions. So I do sometimes envy the scope an essayist or novelist has to pursue an idea or a story. Maybe I just need to write a musical or a double CD prog album or something eh?
What are you reading at the moment?
Kathleen Jamie’s ‘Sightlines’ – very nearly done and just beautiful. She writes the books I wish I’d written myself. ‘The Philosophical Baby’ by Alison Gopnik. I studied philosophy and some of the very tricky, smile-inducing questions my son is coming out with just now (“Are we in a dream mum?”) make me want to understand more from a child development viewpoint. Andrew Hodges biography of Alan Turing is currently fascinating and moving but a wee bit oppressively dense. And my two wee kids are besotted with Ulf Nilsson and Eva Eriksson’s lovely, irreverent ‘The Best Singer in the World’. Thank goodness it’s as good as it is because I’m reading that one A LOT.
What is the first book you remember reading as a child?
‘The Ladybird book of Volcanos’. And it’s a fascination I can share with my 5 year old son Arlo now. We have a nice wee line in improvised songs about Etna and Vesuvius. It’s just too damned hard to get the tongue around Eyjafjallajoekull.
Did you make good use of your library card as a child / teenager?
I was a library buff. And an archive buff too (I visited one first when I was eight). But I was regularly overdue and wound up with horrific fines as a teenager. The only blessing now as a mother trying to get my kids to use the library is that kids don’t get fined on their cards … at least not YET.
Have you ever found a book that you simply couldn’t finish?
Albert Camus’ ‘The Plague’ was so viscerally terrifying I got about a third of the way through it and couldn’t stop physically shaking. Not only could I not finish it, I had to ask a pal to come over and physically remove it from my bedsit so that I could get to sleep! I did get through Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ but it’s the next closest thing there’s been to that bone-deep feeling of utter horror.
Do you read book reviews?
Ach sometimes. But I’m so far behind on what’s current that there often seems little point. I’m much more likely to take a word of mouth recommendation or follow a thread in an interview, a blog, a bibliography or something.
Would you ever re-read the same book?
Yes. I’m blessed with such a shit memory that sometimes I even forget right until the closing pages of a book that I’ve actually read it before (it’s the same with films …)
Have you ever identified with a character in a book? Which one and why?
Nothing about the hardship of her fictional life mirrors my own childhood and family experience, but when I read it first as a teenager, I felt massive empathy towards Chris Guthrie is Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s “Sunset Song”. I just love that book. And there’s a certain kind of ruddy cheeked, dogged Scottish stoicism about her that strikes a chord with me.
Do you read one book at a time or more than one?
I’m a book juggler, though I’d never manage more than one novel at a time (that would fry my head). But almost always multiple non fiction stuff on the go.
Is there an author / poet you would like to collaborate with?
Maybe Kathleen Jamie, though I’m not sure what I could offer. She’s so damned good with words! Definitely poet and novelist James Robertson. There was once mention of setting some of his Scots language poems into song, which is something I’d really love to try some time.
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‘Traces’ is out now.
