Classic Scottish novel set in Aberdeenshire tangled in plagiarism row

Classic Scottish novel Sunset Song is at the heart of new plagiarism row facing claims from an academic that it was copied from a largely unknown author.

Lewis Grassic Gibbon's 1932 book has been read by millions of Scottish schoolchildren over the years, and has inspired both a 1971 BBC adaption and a 2015 movie starring Peter Mullan and Agyness Deyn.

It tells the story of Chris Guthrie, a young woman growing up in a farming family in Kincardineshire at the start of the 20th century, writes the Scottish Daily Express.

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When Scottish journalists were offered a tour of Downing Street before the 2014 referendum, there was even a copy of the nationalist text on the bookshelves in the Cabinet Room.

Now, however, Dr Scott Lyall, associate professor of modern and Scottish literature at Edinburgh Napier University, has proposed that Gibbon was "heavily influenced" by another book published one year earlier by Ian Macpherson, which features a very similar storyline, characters and themes.

"Lewis Grassic Gibbon was accused by Oliver Brown [a writer and Scottish nationalist activist] of plagiarising Jörn Uhl, a German novel of peasant life by Gustav Frenssen, when he wrote Sunset Song,” Dr Lyall tweeted.

“But the parallels with Macpherson’s Shepherds’ Calendar are even more stark. This is especially so in the dilemma of whether the main character should stay and farm the land or leave to go to university.”

He added: “Gibbon and Macpherson even attended the same school, Mackie Academy in Stonehaven, Gibbon four years ahead of Macpherson.”

Dr Lyall, who edited The International Companion to Lewis Grassic Gibbon, published in 2015, insisted there were unmistakable similarities between the two books.

“I’m not necessarily claiming that Gibbon plagiarised Ian Macpherson’s novel, which was published one year before Sunset Song, but very strong parallels definitely exist,” he told The Times.

Gibbon, whose real name was James Leslie Mitchell, died in 1935, at the age of just 33, from peritonitis, brought on from a perforated ulcer. Macpherson died in 1944, aged 38 or 39, in a motorbike accident.

The former is remembered as a giant of 20th century Scottish literature, while the latter is now largely unknown.

Nicola Sturgeon, the former First Minister, wrote an effusive introduction in a republished edition in 2020. “In no small way, I owe my love of literature to Sunset Song,” she wrote.

“It is said that Lewis Grassic Gibbon, just 33 when he died, even younger than that other Scottish genius Robert Burns at the time of his death, wrote this masterpiece in just six weeks.

“In doing so, he gifted us one of the finest literary accomplishments Scotland has ever known. Sunset Song is, without a shadow of doubt, my favourite book of all time.”