Following the publication of his first novel, Stone Over Water, in 1989, Carl MacDougall, who has died aged 81, said he did not know why it had taken him so long to produce his first full work of fiction. He had hardly been inactive up to that point, having published a retelling of Scottish folk tales, A Cuckoo’s Nest (1974), and two collections of short stories, A Scent of Water (1975) and Elvis Is Dead (1986), but while these were much admired, it was the novel that signalled the arrival of a major figure in Scottish letters.
The name of its protagonist, Angus MacPhail, was not selected at random but was an intentional play on the word “fail”. However plucky he was in coping with multiple problems, Angus was seen – and saw himself – as a failure, and it was implied that his failings could be taken as a wider metaphor for the condition of Scotland.
Illegitimate and adopted by a well-meaning but odd couple, Angus writes his autobiography within the novel, in some ways recreating his own being. The fiction created by the author and the equally unreliable life-story forged by the character develop side by side in an intriguingly structured, idiosyncratic novel.
The book introduced themes on which Carl would focus in all his work. These included the survival of Scottish traditions, the complexities of the country’s language and the wider question of Scottish identity.
His second novel, The Lights Below (1993), which won the Winifred Holtby award, features the travails of Andy Paterson, a self-loathing figure who has served time for a crime he did not commit and finds himself on his release lost in a Glasgow that has changed beyond his recognition.
The Casanova Papers (1996) was perhaps Carl’s finest novel. The hero, an ex-political journalist, is left bereft on the death of his wife, and sets out on aimless travels in mainland Europe until he comes into possession of papers left by Giacomo Casanova. The documents feature not the philandering adventurer at large in Venice or in Europe’s capitals, but the elderly, pathetic figure in the castle in Dux, where he squabbled with the majordomo and composed his memoirs. The novel moves elegantly across history, delving into the lives of two derelicts.
Carl also worked as a playwright, journalist, reviewer and editor. His incisive criticism was intended to jolt readers, and his vision of the country’s literary and cultural past was in no way romantic, wistful or boastful. His principal critical work, Painting the Forth Bridge (1999), published in that period of hope that accompanied the opening of the Scottish parliament, carried the sober subtitle A Search for Scottish Identity. Its driving idea was in line with George Orwell’s view that the power that controls the past also controls the future, although Carl was concerned mainly with Scotland’s literary and cultural, as opposed to political, past.
Born in Glasgow, he was the son of Archibald MacDougall, a railway worker who was killed in an accident at work when Carl was six, and Marie (nee Kaufman), of German descent.
His schooldays were troubled, and for a time he was a pupil in Nerston residential school, East Kilbride, but he received most of his education at Possilpark school, Glasgow. He left without qualifications when he was 15 to work in a railway office. Two years later he went to Israel to live on a kibbutz, and subsequently to work in a restaurant in Paris. He moved to Birmingham in 1960 but the following year returned to Glasgow, where a piece he had written about Paris won him a job as a copytaker at the Scottish Daily Express. Carl remained there for 10 years before going freelance. After A Cuckoo’s Nest was published, he established himself as a writer.
Carl was galvanised by an ambition to encourage emerging talent among his contemporaries and to rescue from neglect the creative spirits of other times. In 1977 he launched the magazine Words, and in 1989 edited an anthology of Scottish writing, The Devil and the Giro.
When Glasgow was Europe’s City of Culture in 1990, he took responsibility for a literary sideshow to the year-long Glasgow’s Glasgow exhibition, with an accompanying book, The Words and the Stones. He worked at various times with Scottish Youth Theatre, and was co-editor of New Writing Scotland (2011-13). Between 2016 and 2020 he served as president of Scottish Pen.
His passion for the Scots language was apparent not only in his own fiction but also in Writing Scotland (2004), accompanying a TV series of the same name. He later presented on television Scots: The Language of the People, which led to a similarly titled anthology (2006), featuring writers from John Barbour in the late Middle Ages to the 20th-century poets Edwin Morgan and Tom Leonard.
Carl returned to the short story format in 2017 with Someone Always Robs the Poor, whose title story focuses on the plight of an impoverished family in the turmoil of postwar Poland. A childhood autobiography, Already Too Late: A Boyhood Memoir, is scheduled for publication next month.
His marriage in 1963 to Cynthia Fisher ended in divorce. With his partner Fiona Murray (later MacDougall), he had two children, Euan and Kirsty; the couple separated in the late 1990s. From 2004 he lived with Heather McCabe, a veterinary surgeon. They remained close after separating in April 2022.
His children survive him.
• Carl MacDougall, writer, born 5 April 1941; died 4 April 2023
• This article was amended on 18 May 2023 to correct details of Carl MacDougall’s surviving family.
