Creative Thursday with Alan Bissett

This weeks Creative Thursday interview is with Scottish writer Alan Bissett who is based in Polloksheilds who describes himself as "a novelist, playwright, performer and middleweight boxer. (One of those was a lie)."
SSH: What do you do?I write novels and plays about Scottish working-class life, in all its strange variety.  They’re generally, but not always, set in my hometown of  Falkirk.  I also perform my work onstage often, and at live literature events such as Words Per Minute.
My first novel Boyracers was published in 2001.  I then earned a Masters degree in English and became a lecturer in Creative Writing at the Universities of Leeds and Glasgow.  Increasingly my work has become stage-based, and in 2010 I wrote, performed and toured my own ‘one-woman show’, The Moira Monologues.  This has since been bought by the BBC Scotland for development.  A short film I wrote and narrated The Shutdown, has won several awards at international film festivals.

SSH: What's your favourite piece of work?

My favourite work is Death of a Ladies’ Man, my third novel. It’s about a sex-addicted teacher, and is set against the backdrop of the indie music scene in Glasgow. It’s my most complex and entertaining novel, and I think I managed to achieve a bit of a creative breakthrough with it.

SSH: What's next?My new novel, Pack Men, is launched on Sept 1^st at Waterstones in Sauchiehall St.  It’s about a riot in Manchester, so has turned out to be a wee bit timely.  Irvine Welsh has just called it ‘a landmark in Scottish fiction’.  Which was very nice of him.

SSH: Where do you go for inspiration?Scots Whay Hae is a great website reviewing contemporary Scottish literature.  At a time when big bookselling has closed down opportunities for Scottish novelists who don’t write Crime, coverage like this is now indispensible.  Bella Caledonia also gives an excellent radical perspective on Scottish issues.  Given the times, we need that voice.

SSH: Any bits of advise you've learned that you'd like to share?London doesn’t really care.  All the more reason to do it.

SSH: Favourite place in the Southside?I deliberately don’t have the internet at home, in order to preserve some mental space, so enjoy going to Tapa or the Tramway to use the Wifi.  I’m looking forward to seeing what the imminent Bella Café, a self-avowed arts café, can come up with.

SSH: Name another Southside creative whose work you admire?Rodge Glass, the novelist and biographer of Alasdair Gray, I think will make a real breakthrough with his next book Bring Me The Head of Ryan Giggs. I’ve read it and it’s great, like Fever Pitch meets Taxi Driver.  It’s about time someone wrote a dark novel about the footballing mentality.

SSH: If money was no option what would you change about the Southside?

A wee independent cinema would be handy.

Alan's new novel Packman is being lauched tonight (thursday) at Waterstone's Sauchiehall, at 6.30.