Arts diary: Jack gets plenty of bums on seats for his Music Hall interrogation

Published on Wednesday 18 November 2009 21:00

THE people's painter Jack Vettriano may not yet grace the walls of the National Galleries of Scotland but he's certainly showing his star power at the Aberdeen Music Hall.

It's typically celebrity singers, authors and politicians who do big solo question-and-answer sessions, but Vettriano's one-off Q&A next week is selling out fast, staff say.

The Fife-born painter, whose work The Singing Butler set a record auction price for a Scottish painting, will spend an evening "in conversation" about his life.

The "Look Who's Talking" slot has previously featured Sir Jackie Stewart, Ian Rankin, and Sir Menzies Campbell. Unusually, however, the rear stalls in the 1,000 seat theatre have been put on sale as the rest of the seats have sold out.

Vettriano is preparing for a new exhibition in March 2010. Delayed from this month, the show will go to Kirkcaldy, London and Milan, according to his website, galleries to be confirmed.

Blanking of Rankin

CONTINUING with the theme of popular artists being cold-shouldered by the cognoscenti, the Saltire Society has announced its literary awards shortlist and – surprise, surprise – there's no place for Ian Rankin's The Complaints, or anything penned by Alexander McCall Smith in this year's line-up. Rankin, for one, has never featured in the Saltire's shortlists; that genre writer label keeps him out of the literary fiction stakes, though he's Scottish through and through.

One favourite for Book of the Year must be Janice Galloway's memoir This is Not About Me. She won the title with Clara in 2002; the cash prize, backed by Royal Mail, has doubled since then to 10,000.

It's not a strong year for novels; James Buchan's The Gate of Air, a ghostly tale set in an English country house, is the only novel in the Book of the Year list. But Jason Donald's Chokechain, up for First Book of the Year, about a poor white family growing up in apartheid South Africa, is well regarded.

Others in the running range from What Becomes by AL Kennedy to John MacLeod's When I Heard the Bell Toll: The Loss of the Iolaire.

The book tells of the tragic sinking of a steam yacht outside Stornoway, when 200 men returning from the First World War drowned on New Year's Day 1919.

Robert Crawford's The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography is also listed for Book of the Year, and must be a favourite in this year of Burns for the Homecoming Award (worth 1,500).

Dead good choice

WHEN it comes to writing for teenagers, authors should have no qualms about dishing out a bit of gore. The winner of this year's Booktrust Teenage Prize is Neil Gaiman, with The Graveyard Book. It tells the story of Nobody 'Bod' Owens, a child living in a graveyard after the vicious slaying of his family, raised and educated by ghosts, who faces dreadful horrors in the City of Ghouls while being chased by his parents' killer.