Stevie Marsden – författare

Book publishing is big business, contributing significant employment in the creative industries and adding billions to the global economy. Despite this, the sector is often overlooked in the creative industries' research tide. This book remedies this gap in knowledge, providing an examination of book publishing in the UK within the wider context of the creative industries and the existing academic discourse.Balancing the tensions of art and commerce perhaps more than any other creative field, this book considers the position of the book publishing industry within the contemporary cultural economy. Through this focused analysis on the culture(s) and organisation(s) of book publishing in the UK, the author demonstrates how this creative industry reflects, and perpetuates, many of the key issues and challenges, including inequalities in representation, cultural and economic dominance of global conglomerates, and hierarchies of value, already recognised as central within the creative industries in the UK and beyond.This concise book will be essential reading for academics, researchers, and students with an interest in the publishing industry and its position within the UK Creative Industries and cultural economy.

This cultural history of the Saltire Society Literary Awards demonstrates the significance the awards have had within Scottish literary and cultural life. It is one piece of the wider cultural award puzzle and illustrates how, far from being parochial or niche, lesser-known awards, whose histories may be yet untold, play their own role in the circulation of cultural value through the consecration of literary value. The study of the Society’s Book of the Year and First Book of the Year Awards not only highlights how important connections between literary awards and national culture and identity are within prize culture and how literary awards, and their founding institutions, can be products of the socio-political and cultural milieu in which they form, but this study also illustrates how existing literary award scholarship has only begun to scratch the surface of the complexities of the phenomenon. This book promotes a new approach to considering literary prizes, proposing that the concept of the literary awards hierarchy can contribute to emerging and developing discourses pertaining to literary, and indeed cultural, prizes more broadly.