Gordon Williams 1934-2017. Novelist from Paisley who almost won the Booker Prize

George Gissing’s 1891 novel “New Grub Street” about literary and journalistic London has as its main characters two aspiring writers. Jasper Milvain who puts commercial success ahead of art and secures the editorship of an important periodical and Edwin Reardon who although a talented novelist can’t support his family, his wife leaves him and he […]

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Surviving Emotions

One of the best things about working with archives is finding records that give a real sense of the personality of the writer.  There are many examples of this throughout the John Murray Archive, an archive that spans over two hundred years.  The letters written to the successive heads of the publishing house regularly take a personal […]

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