Anti-hero’s Journey

«This labour of love is everything a critical biography should be: informative, gossipy, admiring and more than capable of restoring Sharp’s reputation, giving him his rightful place in both Scottish literature and Scottish screen writing history. »

(Carl MacDougall, writer and former President of Scottish PEN)

«If Alan Sharp’s career was a unique one within modern Scottish culture, it has proved an underexplored one within modern Scottish Cultural Studies. "The Anti-hero’s Journey" remedies that collective oversight by making a compelling and critically informed case for both the individual singularity and international significance of Sharp’s creative voice.»

(Jonathan Murray, Senior Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture, Edinburgh College of Art)

Alan Sharp was Scotland’s greatest screenwriter and one of its most important transnational writers. The adopted son of a Greenock shipyard worker, he became a bestselling novelist, a leading playwright, a record-breaking Hollywood screenwriter and the central figure of a new Scottish national film industry. Today, however, his books, television plays and screenplays are forgotten.

This study seeks to restore his work to the prominence it deserves. Including previously unknown work available only now in the Alan Sharp papers collection in the University of Dundee Archive, it traces the life’s work of a man who made a unique contribution to Scottish culture and considers his themes, especially his awareness of landscape and his use of the ambivalent male protagonist, the anti-hero.

Working in exile but consistently «coming back» to his homeland, Sharp wrote from a point of view which allowed him to love Scottish culture without having to pamper it and gave him the detachment to connect it with others. «The Anti-hero’s Journey» seeks to reposition him as a vital component of Scottish cultural studies from the 1960s into the twenty-first century and proposes that he should be re-evaluated as a major contributor to contemporary transnational Scottish cultural history.

David Manderson is a novelist, short story writer and researcher. His work ranges across Scottish and international film and literature. His novel «Lost Bodies’ was published in 2011. He has written about the films «Rob Roy» (2009) and «Local Hero» (2010) for the Association for Scottish Literary Studies and co-written chapters for Cambridge University Press and Luath Press. He has also contributed to The Bottle Imp, Chapman Magazine, Gutter Magazine, West Coast Magazine, New Writing Scotland and Hanging Loose Press (New York). He founded a film festival at the Glasgow Film Theatre in 1990 and the creative magazine «Nerve» in 2000. He also ran poetry sessions in Glasgow’s Tchai Ovna Cafe for a decade. In 2000 he won a Scottish Arts Council New Writers’ Award. In 2017 he was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship. His poem «Expedition», animated by Samantha Hendry, won a short film award in 2019.