Ewan Morrison

Morrison’s first book, The Last Book You Read and Other Stories, is a short story collection which explores modern relationships in the era of globalisation and was described by The Times as “the most compelling Scottish literary debut since Trainspotting”.[7] Bertold Schoene in The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature, said “Morrison is concerned with the indispensable necessity of personal relationships, the heroic effort it takes to initiate, trust and maintain them as well as the common everyday trials inherent in being generally human in our globalised twenty first-century world…undeniably Morrison’s collection of short stories makes a contribution to contemporary world literature.”[8] The Last Book You Read and Other Stories led Morrison to being short-listed for the Arena Magazine Man of the Year Award in 2006.[9] One of the short stories within it was made into the short film None of the Above[10], starring Holli Dempsey.[11]

Distance is Morrison’s second novel – “exploring the issue of long-distance relationships, and through this, jealousy, phone sex, parenthood, paranoia, alcoholism and despair.”[12] The Telegraph said, “[Morrison’s] narrative voice is completely original. His prose feels utterly contemporary, with a smooth, readable texture. It is an unusual stylistic shorthand as much influenced by text messaging and emails as literary fiction.”[12] The Times called it “utterly compelling... On this form, Morrison is one of the finest novelists around”.[13] However, other reviewers found the book depressing. “A death would liven things up,” said The Scotsman, “…too much verbiage, conversational psychotherapy”.[14]

Morrison’s third novel Menage, is about three dysfunctional artists living a life of debauched squalor within a bisexual ménage à trois in the artistic subculture of '90s London. Scotland on Sunday said, “Menage is an accomplished, often poignant, novel…[that] strives to go beyond corrosive irony and world-weary cynicism to recapture a sense of the possibilities of love.”[15] The novel innovates with the form of the triad, alternating between the formats of art reviews, past tense confessional memoir and third person present tense. Morrison based the novel on his experiences within the fashionable nihilistic circles of the New British Art Scene in his years after art school.[16]

Close Your Eyes became Morrison’s most highly acclaimed novel to date. The story concerns a woman, Rowan, who was brought up in a hippie commune in the 1960s and 1970s, returning twenty-five years later to search for the mother who abandoned her. Bestselling author Christos Tsioklas said, “It takes us right to the heart of the turbulent social changes that defined our last quarter century and it is a revealing honest, searing novel about mothers and children, about what it means to be part of a family. The story, the writing, the moral intelligence: all of it is a knockout.’[17] The Daily Record called it a “mesmerising saga of survival. Disturbing. Outstanding. Written with exquisite emotional perception.”[18] While the Guardian described it as “A powerful, moving exploration of New Age life that charts a woman's struggle to look after her child while searching for her own mother.”[19]

Close Your Eyes won Morrison the Scottish Book of the Year (SMIT) Fiction Prize in 2014[20] and brought him the Writer of the Year Award of the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Awards in 2012. Morrison has, in interview and articles, described the book as a partly autobiographical reaction to ‘coming to terms with a hippy childhood’ and being raised by political extremists.[21][22][23][24][25]

In the same year Morrison published Tales from the Mall – “‘a mash-up of fact, fiction, essays and multi-format media that tells of the rise of the shopping mall, an iconic symbol of our age”.[26] Douglas Coupland said “Morrison continues Ballard's tradition of locating menace beneath the sleekness and shine of post industrial life. A truly interesting book.”[27] James Frey called it a “new form of literary storytelling”.[27] Irvine Welsh called it "truly Zeitgeist writing.”[28] Tales from the Mall won the Guardian Not the Booker Prize in 2012[29] and was a finalist in the Saltire Society Book of the Year Award[30] and the Creative Scotland Writer of the Year Award in the same year.[31]

Morrison’s seventh book of fiction, Nina X, was published by Fleet, an imprint of Little Brown, on the 4th of April, 2019. It won the 2019 Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Prize, and tells the story of "an extraordinary young woman who is raised from birth in ‘ideological purity’ in a commune-cult and then escapes into our modern world." The Guardian review of Nina X stated that "this is a book that explores many of the same themes as its predecessor – the boundaries of the self, the clash between extremes of historical attempts at collectivism and the hyper-individualism of contemporary society, the legacy of the (false) idealism of the 60s and 70s." [32]