46 Writers from Edinburgh

Archibald Alison FRS FRSE was a Scottish episcopalian priest and essayist.

Charles Neal Ascherson is a Scottish journalist and writer. He has been described as "one of Britain's leading experts on central and eastern Europe". Ascherson is the author of several books on the history of Poland and Ukraine. His work has appeared in The Guardian and The New York Review of Books.

Kate Atkinson is an English writer of novels, plays and short stories. She is known for creating the Jackson Brodie series of detective novels, which has been adapted into the BBC One series Case Histories. She won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize in 1995 in the Novels category for Behind the Scenes at the Museum, winning again in 2013 and 2015 under its new name the Costa Book Awards.

James Ballantine was a Scottish artist and author.

Robert Michael Ballantyne was a Scottish author of juvenile fiction who wrote more than 100 books. He was also an accomplished artist, and exhibited some of his water-colours at the Royal Scottish Academy.

Anne Bannerman was a Scottish poet. She was part of the Edinburgh literary circle which included John Leyden, Jessie Stewart, and Thomas Campbell, and Dr Robert Anderson. Her work "remains significant for her Gothic ballads, as well as for her innovative sonnet series and her bold original odes."

Helen Brodie Cowan Bannerman, was a Scottish author of children's books. She is best known for her first book, Little Black Sambo (1899).

James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck, was a Scottish biographer, diarist, and lawyer, born in Edinburgh. He is best known for his biography of his friend and older contemporary, the English writer Samuel Johnson, which is commonly said to be the greatest biography written in the English language. A great mass of Boswell's diaries, letters and private papers were recovered from the 1920s to the 1950s, and their ongoing publication by Yale University has transformed his reputation.

John Campbell was a Scottish author. He contributed to George Sale's Universal History, and wrote a Political Survey of Britain (1744). He was both prolific and well paid: according to James Boswell, Samuel Johnson spoke of Campbell to Joseph Warton as 'the richest author that ever grazed the common of literature.'

John Gerald Collee is a Scottish screenwriter whose film scripts include Master and Commander (2003), Happy Feet (2006), Creation (2009), and Walking with Dinosaurs (2013). He is also a journalist and a novelist. Collee practised medicine and wrote several novels before he became a full-time screenwriter. He is married to Deborah Snow, with whom he has three children.

Frances Mary Colquhoun was a Scottish writer.

Anne Jane Cupples, née Douglas was a Scottish writer and populariser of science. She was married to a famous maritime novelist George Cupples, and after his death moved to be with her sisters in New Zealand, where she died in 1896. She wrote around fifty books in total, mostly intended for children, under the name Mrs George Cupples.

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was a British writer and medical doctor. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes stories are generally considered milestones in the field of crime fiction.

Andrew Drummond is a Scottish writer, translator and novelist. He was born in Edinburgh and studied at the University of Aberdeen and the University of London. Previously employed full-time as a software engineer, he now pursues his writing full-time.

Robert Fergusson was a Scottish poet. After formal education at the University of St Andrews, Fergusson led a bohemian life in Edinburgh, the city of his birth, then at the height of intellectual and cultural ferment as part of the Scottish enlightenment. Many of his extant poems were printed from 1771 onwards in Walter Ruddiman's Weekly Magazine, and a collected works was first published early in 1773. Despite a short life, his career was highly influential, especially through its impact on Robert Burns. He wrote both Scottish English and the Scots language, and it is his vivid and masterly writing in the latter leid for which he is principally acclaimed.

James Frederick Ferrier was a Scottish metaphysical writer and philosopher. He introduced the word epistemology in philosophical English, as well as coining agnoiology for the study of ignorance.

Susan Edmonstone Ferrier was a Scottish novelist. Her novels, giving vivid accounts of Scottish life and presenting sharp views on women's education, remained popular throughout the 19th century.

Sir John Foster Fraser was a Scottish travel author. In July 1896, he and two friends, Samuel Edward Lunn and Francis Herbert Lowe, took a bicycle trip around the world riding Rover safety bicycles. They covered 19,237 miles in two years and two months, travelling through 17 countries and across three continents. He documented the trip in the book Round the World on a Wheel.

Adrian Anthony Gill was an English writer and critic. Best known for food and travel writing, he was The Sunday Times' restaurant reviewer as well as a television critic. He also wrote for Vanity Fair, GQ, and Esquire, and published numerous books. Gill wrote his first piece for Tatler in 1991, and joined The Sunday Times in 1993.

James Grant (1822–1887) was a Scottish novelist and miscellaneous writer.

John Miller Gray (1850-1894) was a Scottish art critic and the first curator of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

Christian Edington Guthrie Wright was a Scottish campaigner for women's higher education, co-founder of the Edinburgh School of Cookery.

Graham Bruce Hancock is a British writer and journalist. He is known for his pseudoscientific theories involving ancient civilisations, Earth changes, stone monuments or megaliths, altered states of consciousness, ancient myths, and astronomical or astrological data from the past.

Scott Hastie, is an author and poet. He was brought up and educated in Berkhamsted, prior to college studies in Brighton.

John Macmillan Herdman is a Scottish novelist, short story writer and literary critic. He is the author of seventeen books including five novels and various works of shorter fiction, a play, two critical studies and a memoir, and he has contributed to twenty other books. His work has been translated, broadcast and anthologized, and taught at universities in France, Australia and Russia.

Robert William Jameson, WS (1805–1868), was a Scottish Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh, Town Councillor, newspaper editor, poet and playwright. He was the father of Sir Leander Starr Jameson, South African statesman and prime minister, and the nephew of Professor Robert Jameson of the University of Edinburgh. Born in Edinburgh in 1805, Robert William was the son of Thomas Jameson, a wealthy shipowner, merchant and burgess of the city of Edinburgh, as recorded in Colvin, Vol. 1: 1-2 (1922). Colvin writes of Robert William's father and grandfather, both of whom were named Thomas Jameson, that:

Jacqueline Margaret Kay,, is a Scottish poet, playwright, and novelist, known for her works Other Lovers (1993), Trumpet (1998) and Red Dust Road (2011). Kay has won a number of awards, including the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1998 and the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award in 2011.

Jessie Kerr Lawson, May 19, 1838 – July 30, 1917 was a Scottish-Canadian writer and poet.

Philip Ballantyne Kerr was a British author, best known for his Bernie Gunther series of historical detective thrillers.

Sir Thomas Dick Lauder of Fountainhall, 7th Baronet, FRSE FSA(Scot) LLD was a Scottish author. He served as Secretary to the Board of Manufactures (1839–), on the Herring Fisheries Board, at the Royal Institution for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts, and as Deputy Lieutenant of both counties of Moray and Haddington.

Colin Mackenzie was a nineteenth century literary contributor/hack writer, editor, translator and compiler. Between 1849 and 1851 he was the secretary of Charles Cochrane's 'National Philanthropic Association.' Mackenzie spent his adult life living and working in London, England. His interests were wide ranging and his publications reflected this. They were primarily works of non-fiction, including educational and informative works on chemistry, cookery, medicine, popular science, geography, history, economics and religion, but he also wrote about the 'gentlemen's clubs' of London, a 'parliamentary pocketbook' with a strong reformist leaning in 1832 and, towards the end of his career, a report on the chronic poverty and famine that scarred Britain and engulfed Ireland in the late 1840s.

Hector Copland Macpherson, was a Scottish astronomer and minister. His 1940 work Biographical Dictionary of Astronomy was later incorporated into the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, which was first published in 2007.

Graham Masterton is a British horror author. Originally editor of Mayfair and the British edition of Penthouse, Graham Masterton's first novel The Manitou was released in 1976. This novel was adapted in 1978 for the film The Manitou. Further works garnered critical acclaim, including a Special Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America for Charnel House and a Silver Medal by the West Coast Review of Books for Tengu. He is also the only non-French winner of the prestigious Prix Julia Verlanger for his novel Family Portrait, an imaginative reworking of the Oscar Wilde novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Masterton was also the editor of Scare Care, a horror anthology published for the benefit of abused children in Europe and the U.S.

William Topaz McGonagall was an Irish weaver, poet and actor who lived in Scotland. He won notoriety as an extremely bad poet who exhibited no recognition of, or concern for, his peers' opinions of his work.

Robert Mylne was a Scottish writer of pasquils, and antiquary. He is generally described as a writer of Edinburgh, but also as an engraver.

John Phin was a prolific author and publisher, a teacher of applied science and a Shakespeare scholar.

Robin Ramsay is a Scottish author, and co-founder and editor of the magazine, Lobster. Ramsay writes about politics and conspiracy theories. His books have been published by HarperCollins and Pocket Essentials. His writings have resulted in him receiving death threats from the fascist group Combat 18.

John Gerald Christopher Ryan was a British animator and cartoonist, best known for his character Captain Pugwash.

Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet was a Scottish historical novelist, poet, playwright, and historian. Many of his works remain classics of both English-language literature and of Scottish literature. Famous titles include The Lady of the Lake and the novels Waverley, Old Mortality, Rob Roy, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, The Bride of Lammermoor, and Ivanhoe.

Saira Elizabeth Luiza Shah was a Scottish writer who wrote under the pen name Morag Murray Abdullah. She met the Afghan author, poet, diplomat, scholar, and savant Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah and wrote about her marriage to this chieftain's son and her travels in the North-West Frontier Province of British India and the mountains of Afghanistan.

Sara Sheridan is a Scottish activist and writer who works in a variety of genres, though predominately in historical fiction. She is the creator of the Mirabelle Bevan mysteries.

Catherine Sinclair was a Scottish novelist and a writer of children's literature which departed from the moralising approach common in that period. She is credited with discovering that the author of the anonymous Waverley Novels was Sir Walter Scott.

Dame Muriel Sarah Spark was a British novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist.

Dorothy Emily Stevenson (1892–1973) was a best-selling Scottish author. She published more than 40 "light romantic novels" over a span of more than 40 years.

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet and travel writer, most noted for Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and A Child's Garden of Verses.

Irvine Welsh is a Scottish novelist, playwright and short story writer. His novel Trainspotting was made into a film of the same name. His work is characterised by a raw Scots dialect and brutal depiction of Edinburgh life. He has also written plays and screenplays, and directed several short films.