As was the case throughout much of western culture, the catalytic impact of World War I on the development of modernism brought the next major winds of change to Scottish literature. In Scotland’s case, these international currents were combined with a resurgent political nationalism, most notably in the life and work of Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978), the pseudonym of Christopher Murray Grieve, de facto leader of the literary movement that began during the inter-war years, and came to be known as the Scottish Renaissance.

MacDiarmid’s own particular agenda involved the reassertion and regeneration of the Scots language as a medium for serious literature, capable of participating in the avant-garde of European thought, while maintaining its own vigorous identity. In such poetic works as Sangschaw (1925), Penny Wheep (1926) and the seminal A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), he developed his own form of so-called “synthetic Scots”, its vocabulary drawn from all regions and periods, in order to address the circumstances of contemporary Scotland against this internationalist backdrop.

MacDiarmid also founded and edited two short-lived but influential literary periodicals, Northern Numbers (1920-2) and The Scottish Chapbook (1922-3), publishing original poetry and prose alongside criticism and essays. His aims, as stated in the latter title, were, “to insist upon truer evaluations of the work of Scottish writers than are usually given in the present over-anglicised condition of British literary journalism. . . to elucidate, apply and develop the distinctively Scottish range of values.”

More broadly, the term “Scottish Renaissance” refers to the emergence of numerous other distinguished Scottish writers during this period. MacDiarmid and his fellow poets Edwin Muir and William Soutar, the novelists Neil Gunn, George Blake, Nan Shepherd, AJ Cronin, Naomi Mitchison, Eric Linklater and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and the playwright James Bridie, for instance, were all born within the same 15-year span, between 1887 and 1901.

Their diversity of approach precludes any attempt to link them into a unified “school” or programme, but many were involved - directly or indirectly, thematically and/or linguistically - in exploring issues of identity, “voice” and self-expression within and beyond 20th century Scotland, and contributed to the modern development of a distinctively Scottish cultural agenda. Further common traits included an active rejection of nostalgia, engagement with social and political themes, and a redefinition of “place”, or regionality, determinedly divorced from parochialism.

Under MacDiarmid’s influence, many subsequent poets went on to write in Scots with increasing fluency and dwindling self-consciousness, prominent among them being Robert Garioch (1909-1981) and Sydney Goodsir Smith (1915-1975). English-language poetry also flourished alongside vernacular work, in the hands of such leading exponents as Norman MacCaig (1910-96), George Bruce (1909-2002) and Maurice Lindsay (b.1918).

The striking longevity enjoyed by many of these authors, and their successors, saw this momentum steadily maintained after World War II. George Mackay Brown (1921-1996) and Iain Crichton Smith each straddled poetry and prose fiction (Smith in both English and Gaelic), with their respective island backgrounds - Brown was from Orkney, Smith from Lewis - lending their work much of its distinctive tone and perspective.

The creative range of the much-loved and much-garlanded Glaswegian poet Edwin Morgan, named in early 2004 by the Scottish Executive as the inaugural “Scots Makar”, or Scottish poet laureate, is suggested by the title of his 1973 collection, From Glasgow to Saturn. He is also a noted linguist, who has translated works by Mayakovsky, Racine, Rostand and Neruda into Scots and English, and the author of the stage trilogy AD, a dramatisation of the life of Christ. Sorley MacLean (1911-1996), meanwhile, was bringing a similar spirit of expansive modernity to Gaelic poetry, although it was not until the 1970s that he received wider recognition.

A comparable cosmopolitanism is apparent in the careers of many post-war Scottish novelists – not least in plain geographical terms. Many of the leading figures from this period, including Muriel Spark (b.1918), James Kennaway (1928-1968), Alexander Trocchi (1925-1984), Jessie Kesson (1916-1994) and Robin Jenkins (b.1912) have spent much or most of their lives outside Scotland. In the case of Trocchi – claimed as Scotland’s only authentic Beat writer, and cited as a key cult influence on many of today’s younger literati – his departure to Paris was an explicit escape from Scotland’s “turgid, petty, puritan, stale-porridge, Bible-class nonsense”, in order to become a self-styled “cosmonaut of inner space”.

Marriage and jobs drew Spark, Kennaway and Kesson to London (Spark via Africa, and later on to New York and Italy), while Jenkins has worked as an English teacher in Afghanistan, Spain and Borneo. The imprint of their home culture remains nonetheless discernible throughout their diverse output, most directly in Kesson’s autobiographical tales, set in Scotland’s north-east, and most famously in Spark’s classic Edinburgh novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). On the mass-market front, the Scottish tradition of adventure stories has been successfully continued in the action novels of Alistair MacLean (1922-1987), and that of historical fiction by Dorothy Dunnett (1923-2001).

While younger novelists such as Shena Mackay, Alan Spence and Allan Massie each cut a somewhat solitary – albeit distinctive – figure during the 1960s and 70s, there were shades of things to come in the work of William McIlvanney, whose novel Docherty, the story of a west of Scotland miner and “hard man” as seen by his son, won the 1975 Whitbread Prize. McIlvanney continued his investigation of the wounded working-class male psyche in The Big Man (1985) as well his thriller series centred on a Glasgow police detective, beginning with the eponymous Laidlaw (1977).

In the main, however - again under MacDiarmid’s influence, combined with that convergence of unusually extended careers – poetry continued to be seen as the primary standard-bearer for Scottish literature, more or less until the end of the 1970s. And while this coterie of long-lived poets were still producing strong and evolving work, in someways their hegemony came to seem like a stranglehold.