Colin Waters – författare

The explosive findings within this book are history-changing. They discount the age-old belief that Captain James Cook, the great circumnavigator, left no modern direct descendants. Using compelling, detailed and verifiable evidence, Colin Waters completely unravels, for the first time, the full fascinating story concerning the mysterious supposed 18th century drowning of his son, James Cook junior. The author also presents genealogical evidence to support old rumours that after faking his own death, James travelled to North Yorkshire where he joined his wife & son, leaving behind him a scandal that resulted in him being virtually expunged from all official naval records. The Royal Navy cover-up that resulted matches any modern-day conspiracy theory and gives credence to all those who today claim to be direct descendants of the famous Captain James Cook R.N.

Throw a stone in Edinburgh or Glasgow today and you'll hit a poet. The Scottish spoken word scene has exploded, reaching a level of popularity last seen in the late 1970s, another era, coincidentally, when the issue of Scottish self-determination was in the air. A generation of poets has emerged who have grown up in an age of change, political and technological, with the internet providing them not only with new ways of sharing writing - through their websites, podcasts, Twitter - but also in some cases with a subject too. The Sound of Youngish Scotland is the first attempt to capture the spirit of a diverse scene where every poet is their own movement - from McGuire's hilarious, Beat-inflected deconstructions of sexuality to MacGillivray's mystic tales of Scottish cowboys, equal parts MacDiarmid and McCarthy; from William Letford's building-site tales to Russell Jones' sci-fi poetry. It's a scene where you are just as liable to encounter ancient gods as you are video game characters. The Sound of Youngish Scotland features forty poets, mostly under-forty who have made Scotland their home. It's a survey, a yearbook, a celebration and a promise of things to come.