Percy's Duck Feet and Canongate top Scotland National Book Awards

Ely Percy’s coming-of-age novel Duck Feet (Monstrous Regiment) took Book of the Year at the Scotland National Book Awards 2021, while Canongate scooped Publisher of the Year. 

Scottish writer Percy, who rebuilt their life through creative writing following a traumatic brain injury at the age of 14, won the overall Book of the Year prize for what judges called a “micro landscape of teenagehood painted masterfully in Scots” after first winning the Fiction category.

Canongate Books took Publisher of the Year while fellow indie Charco Press was highly commented at the ceremony, run by the Saltire Society digitally, on 27th November. 

First Book of the Year went to Bleak: The Mundane Comedy (Saraband) by Roddy Murray, dubbed “a memoir of sorts” by organisers, while Peter Ross’ celebration of graveyards, A Tomb With a View (Headline), was crowned Non Fiction Book of the Year. 

In the Poetry category, Daisy Lafarge was victorious for Life Without Air (Granta), described by judges as “a strange concoction of biology, chemistry and personal relationships that somehow come together in poetic form".

Stuart Style’s Monarchy, Dress and the Scottish Male Elite (Yale University Press) took the History category, while the Research Book of the Year went to Darkness Visible: The Sculptor’s Cave, Covesea, from the Bronze Age to the Picts (Society of Antiquaries of Scotland) by Ian Armit and Lindsey Buster. 

For the Book Cover category, Pablo Font’s cover design for Jorge Consiglio’s Fate (Charco Press) was named the winner.

Ceris Jones, campaigns manager at Sandstone Press, and Jamie Norman, campaigns executive at Canongate, were named Emerging Publishers of the Year.  

Finally, the Callum MacDonald Memorial Award went to Roncadora Press along with Donald S Murray’s pamphlet Achanalt.