Cover of the book "Bucket of Tongues" by Duncan McLean, showing a silhouette of a person standing next to a toilet and a woman with short hair and a skirt standing beside a wall, with the title and author’s name at the bottom.

story

Duncan McLean was born in Aberdeenshire in 1964 and has lived in Orkney since 1992.

While based in Edinburgh in the 1980s, he started writing songs, stand-up routines, and plays for the Merry Mac Fun Co, a street theatre and comedy act with agitprop tendencies. The Merry Macs toured widely, won various awards, and were twice nominated for the Perrier Comedy Award.

In December 1990, with the writer James Meek, McLean set up the Clocktower Press, a small publishing house, which helped bring a new generation of Scottish writers to wider attention. The booklets included the first separately published extracts of what would later become Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, as well as work from Alan Warner, Janice Galloway, Gordon Legge, Alison Flett, James Kelman, John Aberdein, Simon Crump and others. McLean edited an anthology of these and other Clocktower writers, as well as new contributors including Ali Smith, Leila Aboulela and Robert Alan Jamieson. Ahead of its Time was published by Jonathan Cape in 1997.

Book cover titled 'Ahead of Its Time' featuring a colorful map of the United Kingdom and Ireland, with contributor names Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, James Kelman, Janice Galloway listed. Edited by Duncan McLean.

In 1992, McLean published his first book, a collection of short stories called Bucket of Tongues, and since then has published several more, including novels, plays and a music travelogue. He has also continued to write for the theatre, from the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of Aalst which toured the UK and Australia in 2007, to Telling the Truth Beautifully: The Trial of James Kirkness (a story of gin smuggling and political change in 19th century Kirkwall) for the 2015 St Magnus Festival, to the Royal Lyceum’s production of an Orkney Treasure Island in 2024.

McLean leads a western swing band which in 2009 and 2010, under the name The Lone Star Swing Band, toured Scotland and Ireland in a new McLean play, Long Gone Lonesome. The show went on to tour the USA in 2012. Telling the story of the reclusive Shetland musician Thomas Fraser, it was produced by the National Theatre of Scotland and directed by Vicky Featherstone. Under the name The Driftwood Cowboys, the band continues to perform McLean’s songs across Orkney.

Silhouette of a person wearing a cowboy hat, standing on rocks near the ocean, playing a guitar at sunset with a cloudy sky.

In 2015, McLean launched a new lo-fi imprint, the Abersee Press, with a booklet of contemporary Orkney-language writing by eight poets and story writers. Abersee's professed goal is to kick-start a new wave of north-isles writing, as the Clocktower Press did for Edinburgh in the 1990s.

In 2020 and 2021, McLean co-edited (with Brian Hamill) two books in The Common Breath's short-lived Classics series. His introductions shed new light on significant but forgotten writers from literary history.

Since 2020, he has written a weekly column for The Orcadian newspaper, following in the footsteps of another literary hero, George Mackay Brown.

Long Gone Lonesome, by Colin Kirkpatrick
A black and white photo of two authors, a woman and a man, sitting indoors. The woman, on the left, is smiling and wearing a patterned sweater with a scarf. The man, on the right, is also smiling, wearing a plaid shirt, and holding a coffee mug. 
The Orcadian, 1995