Ian Rankin on Edinburgh: A City of Stories

It is impossible to be an author in Edinburgh without being conscious of the many previous generations of writers for whom the city has provided sustenance and inspiration. The visitor who arrives in Edinburgh by train emerges from Waverley Station (named after Sir Walter Scott’s first novel) onto Princes Street and cannot fail to notice the jagged, towering presence of the Scott Monument (at some 60 metres [200 feet] in height, it is the tallest structure in the world built to celebrate a writer’s life and legacy). Other statues and memorials are dotted around the city, commemorating Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Fergusson, and the world’s most famous detective, Sherlock Holmes. There are pubs with names such as the Jekyll and Hyde and the Conan Doyle. Walking downhill from Edinburgh Castle—down what is known as the Royal Mile—the pedestrian passes, in quick succession, the Writers’ Museum (dedicated to Scott, Stevenson, and Robert Burns), the city’s two main libraries, the offices of Canongate Books (Scotland’s most successful and enterprising independent book publisher), the Scottish Storytelling Centre, the Scottish Book Trust, and the Scottish Poetry Library. At the end of this walk sits a recent structure, home to the Scottish Parliament, on whose exterior walls are carved quotes from Scottish authors of the past. Literature, it seems, is not just part of the city’s heritage but has seeped into the very structure of the place.

Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows, was born in Edinburgh. So too was Muriel Spark, who wrote so vividly of the city in her masterpiece The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. J.M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, attended university in Edinburgh (as, for a time, did Charles Darwin and Thomas Carlyle). The adventure novel The Coral Island, still in print a century and a half after publication, was written by R.M. Ballantyne, who was born and educated in Edinburgh. The philosopher David Hume is another whose statue can be found on the Royal Mile. Hume was active at a time when Edinburgh was known as a “hotbed of genius,” with thinkers and visionaries from Adam Smith to Benjamin Franklin nourished by conversation in the city’s clubs and taverns (see Scottish Enlightenment). Moreover, the Encyclopædia Britannica was first published in Edinburgh, while The Chambers Dictionary still makes Edinburgh its home.

The above—by no means an exhaustive list—may go some way toward explaining why Edinburgh was chosen in 2004 by UNESCO to be the world’s first City of Literature. But Edinburgh offers something more: a lively contemporary writing and publishing scene. The area of the city where I make my home is known locally as “writers’ block,” in the main because J.K. Rowling, Alexander McCall Smith, and I live within a few hundred yards of each other. Nor do we keep ourselves to ourselves: local café owners know that Ms. Rowling still writes at various tables with a mug of coffee beside her; Professor McCall Smith and myself have been known to share a few drams of malt of an evening, while discussing everything and anything. Irvine Welsh (of Trainspotting fame) also keeps a home in the city, and novelist Kate Atkinson, who won a Whitbread Book Award for Behind the Scenes at the Museum, is another Edinburgh resident. Meantime, the annual Edinburgh International Book Festival is the largest in Europe, bringing authors of worldwide repute such as Harold Pinter, Gore Vidal, and Seamus Heaney to the city to meet, converse, and share tales and anecdotes—very like the get-togethers of old where Scott or Burns might be liable to drop in. Edinburgh remains very much a city of stories.

But why?