A Kick Up The Arts with Nicola Meighan
A Scottish Arts & Culture Podcast with Nicola Meighan
A Kick Up The Arts with Nicola Meighan
Bloody Scotland 2026
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
I’m back in my Stirling local, the Golden Lion, for a whistle-stop tour of this year’s programme for Bloody Scotland International Crime Writing Festival, which launched a couple of days ago, and which runs from September 18th to 20th.
After Thursday’s big announcements, and a conversation I chaired with the always-entertaining JD Kirk, I sat down with this year’s Bloody Scotland guest programmer, Denise Mina, festival director Bob McDevitt and best-selling author and board member Craig Robertson - along with two of the brilliant writers shortlisted for this year’s prestigious debut prize - Linda Duncan McLaughlin, for Original Sins - and May Rinaldi, for Liar Thief…
We had a blether about this year’s line-up, which as ever includes unmissable book events, along with site-specific theatre, karaoke, courtroom drama, and incredible guests - along with new-writing initiatives like Crime in the Spotlight and Pitch Perfect, and the announcement of the gilded debut prize, and the McIlvanney Prize for crime fiction book of the year…
I’m a McIlvanney Prize judge again, and we’ll chat more about all that soon enough, but for now, here’s a sense of what to expect if you come to this year’s Bloody Scotland in September… Which you totally should…