Bella Caledonia : An Anthology

EDITED by Mike Small INCLUDES CONTRIBUTIONS FROM:

Andy Wightman   Alan Bissett   Brian Quail   George Rosie   Kathleen Jamie   Peter Arnott   Scott Hames   Laura Easton Lewis   Meaghan Delahunt   AL Kennedy  Alistair Davidson   Alastair McIntosh   Katie Gallogly-Swan   Max Macleod Caitlin Logan  Irvine Welsh  Paul Tritschler  Chloe Farand   Abi Lightbody   Dougie Strang   Mairi McFadyen  Christopher Silver George Gunn   Neil Cooper  Jamie Maxwell  Rory Scothorne  Amna Saleem  Alison Phipps  Stuart Christie   George Kerevan   Iain MacKinnon   Dougald Hine   Cait O’Neil McCullach   Raman Mundair   Adam Ramsay

In October 2007, writers Mike Small and Kevin Williamson launched Bella Caledonia at the Radical Book Fair in Edinburgh. Since then, Bella has consistently explored ideas of self-determination and offered Scotland’s most robust and insightful political commentary.

In the run up to Scottish independence referendum, international interest grew and Bella Caledonia had more than 500,000 unique users a month, with a peak of one million in August ― and since then has been given multiple awards recognising it as one of the top 10 political blogs in the UK.

This anthology, curated by Mike Small, is a flavour of Bella’s output over these 14 years ― the editor’s pick.

Bella is aligned to no political party and sees herself as the bastard child of parent publications too good for this world; from Calgacus to Red Herring, from Harpies & Quines to the Black Dwarf.

Under Mike’s editorship, Bella has developed a ‘Fifth Estate’ as a way of disrupting the passive relationship of old media, creating something more active and appropriate for the 21st century ― it’s about concentration of ownership, and bringing together radical coverage with cultural analysis. Hence the plethora of wide-ranging voices in this anthology, each representing outlier viewpoints in contemporary society ― novelists, poets, bloggers and journalists publishing in non-mainstream media outlets, and the social media.