Janice Galloway’s All Made Up is Scottish Book of the Year

All Made Up, which was the winner of the Non-fiction category of the awards, won the overall prize in the face of stiff competition from the Fiction, Poetry, and First Book category winners – Ali Smith, Angus Peter Campbell and Simon Stephenson respectively – and Galloway will receive a total prize of £30,000.

All Made Up is an eloquent, personal account of Galloway’s struggle to make sense of the physical and emotional changes of adolescence in which she reveals how the awkward child introduced in This is Not About Me evolved through her teenage years, living with her stoical mother and domineering older sister.

Janice Galloway’s first novel, The Trick is to Keep Breathing, is now widely regarded as a Scottish contemporary classic. She has since penned three novels, three short story collections, one volume of poetry, and two autobiographies. On winning the award she said ‘I am very grateful indeed that the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust are keeping the faith in writing and writers in these extremely testing times for the arts. The judges have chosen a shortlist to be proud of.’

Dr Gavin Wallace, Chair of the Judging Panel and Creative Scotland Portfolio Manager for Literature, Publishing and Language, said ‘This is Not About Me is a startling, shocking, and searing book, written with razor-sharp brilliance and immediacy and plangent poetic lyricism. It is an unforgettably vivid evocation of a very particular time and place – urban Ayrshire in the 1960s and 70s – but it is also universal in its deeply moving anatomy of the nourishing and survival of the artist through an enlightened education, in the midst of social and familial forces which seem to conspire against creativity and imagination at every turn.’

Previous winners of the prestigious award include renowned and acclaimed authors such as Jackie Kay for her autobiography Red Dust Road in 2011 and Edwin Morgan for his poetry collection A Book of Lives in 2008.