“For several decades,” wrote the editor and publisher Peter Kravitz, in his introduction to The Faber Book of Contemporary Scottish Fiction (1995), “Scottish literature appeared to the world as a group of male poets sitting round a table covered in malt whiskies in The Abbotsford Bar in Edinburgh. A writer only got admitted if one of them died. And if you weren't a poet you might as well wait at the door.”

The satire is part-affectionate, but Kravitz earned the right to a degree of acidity through his role as one of two key midwives to the latest revival in Scottish writing, which began around 1980 and continues apace to this day. And while the timing of this upsurge made it seem like a direct and immediate response to the failure of the 1979 devolution referendum, and the same year’s watershed general election, which swept Margaret Thatcher to power, it was in fact the product of a long gestation.

It was during Kravitz’s crucial term as editor that Polygon, the former Edinburgh University student imprint, came to lead the field in publishing new Scottish fiction during the 1980s, while his overlapping editorship of the Edinburgh Review supplied a direct “feed” of fresh talent. As far back as 1971, however, several now-leading Scottish authors had begun to meet every fortnight at a creative writing group run by the celebrated critic, poet and teacher Philip Hobsbaum, at his home in Glasgow.

Hobsbaum, then a lecturer in English at Glasgow University, had previously run such groups in Cambridge, London and Belfast, where he was instrumental in launching the careers of Seamus Heaney, Bernard MacLaverty, Peter Porter and others. Among the Glasgow group’s future luminaries were James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, Liz Lochhead, Tom Leonard and Aonghas MacNeacail.

Despite their striking diversity, these writers and their immediate successors – Janice Galloway, A.L. Kennedy, Jeff Torrington – all share a vigorous concern with issues of “voice” and “place”, and with their relation to the locus and nature of literature itself. It’s a trait that links them at once directly back to MacDiarmid (and thence to Burns), directly on to the subsequent emergence of such talents as Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, Duncan McLean, Laura Hird, Ali Smith and Jackie Kay.

Scottish literature during this time operated as an informal, evolving, mutual support network, organically based on word-of-mouth recommendation and broadly shared goals between key individuals and organisations. The latter also included the short-lived but influential magazine Scottish International (1968-74), the Glasgow Print Studio Co-operative (via which Hobsbaum’s group disseminated their early work), the Third Eye Centre (where they held readings; now the Centre for Contemporary Arts), the Edinburgh publishers Canongate (who published Gray’s landmark debut novel Lanark in 1981), Duncan McLean’s pamphlet-based, fanzine-style Clocktower Press (1990-96), and Kevin Williamson’s Rebel Inc. magazine (1992-??).

After Kelman, Galloway, Kennedy, Torrington, Welsh, Warner and McLean were all subsequently picked up by the same major London publisher, under the editorship of (Scottish) poet Robin Robertson, the seal was set on Scotland’s new literary renaissance with such headline achievements as Welsh’s seismically influential debut novel Trainspotting (1993), Warner’s Morvern Caller (1995), Gray’s Poor Things (1992) and Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late (1994). The last two titles between them won three of the UK’s top literary awards, Gray taking the Whitbread and the Guardian Fiction Prize, while Kelman controversially claimed the Booker.

The immediate shock value of both Kelman’s and Welsh’s work, in particular, arose from their liberal – they would argue merely realistic – use of bare-knuckle expletives, together with their vividly rendered use of vernacular language as a whole. Similarly unsettling to a London-centred, predominantly middle-class literary establishment was the tendency among all these writers to zero in on marginalized areas of experience, often amidst the social desolation and anomie of those Scottish communities hardest hit by Thatcherite policies. Even in the absence of any explicit political agenda (which was unapologetically present in many cases), the alloy of non-standard English – or rather, arguably, not English at all, but Scots – and previously under-explored fictional territory has proved a potently subversive tool, wielded in an array of styles with arresting technical assurance.

While prose fiction certainly commandeered most of the limelight during the 1980s and 1990s, poetry was also flourishing in the hands of a new generation, and amidst the increasingly buoyant and confident mood that pervaded the Scottish cultural scene in the run-up to devolution. Abetted also by a brief, UK-wide media fad that declared poetry to be “the new rock’n’roll”, the likes of Don Paterson, Robert Crawford, Carol Anne Duffy, and Kathleen Jamie joined Morgan and Lochhead among Britain’s poetry premier league.

The widespread interest in matters of voice has also prompted expansion in the field of spoken-word poetry, with Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts running several highly popular series of performances by visiting artists during the late 1990s. The subsequent relocation of the promoters Big Word Performance Poetry from London to Edinburgh has helped encourage the development of a home-grown scene, by hosting competitive poetry “slams” as well as performance programmes.

The boom in novels has continued with yet another recent wave of promising debuts, among them Louise Welsh’s The Cutting Room, Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White and Anne Donovan’s Buddha Da. Scottish crime fiction has been another notably fast-growing sector, spearheaded by the phenomenal success of Edinburgh’s Ian Rankin and his Rebus novels, but also encompassing such disparate exponents as Val McDermid, Frederic Lindsay, Christopher Brookmyre, Quentin Jardine and Denise Mina.

For all these reasons, international interest in Scottish literature has never been higher, as reflected by recent increases in the Literature Department, Scottish Arts Council’s Literature Department translation fund, which is nonetheless being outstripped by escalating demand from overseas publishers. The multinationals, too, are recognising that Scottish writing looks to be on a long-term roll, Penguin and Hodder Headline having created new editorial appointments with specific responsibility for this area. Within Scotland, today’s prevailing buoyancy of mood has led to a renewed spirit of collective purpose among the literary community, given extra impetus by the immediate context of the Cultural Commission’s researches. Ideas and proposals currently under debate include a new, cross-sectoral networking and lobbying organisation, provisionally known as Literature Scotland, and a series of recommendations detailed in the SAC’s Review of Publishing (2004), aimed at developing the industry’s infrastructure and performance.