Carl MacDougall

CARL MacDOUGALL was one of Scotland’s most accomplished and celebrated literary writers. His work includes three prize-winning novels, four pamphlets, four collections of short stories and two works of non-fiction. He edited four anthologies, including the bestselling The Devil and the Giro (Canongate, 1989). He held many posts as writer-in-residence both in Scotland and England, and presented two major television series for the BBC, Writing Scotland and Scots: The Language of the People. With Ron Clark, he co-wrote ‘Cod Liver Oil and the Orange Juice’ – a parody of the song ‘Virgin Mary Had a Little Baby’ – which was adapted and popularised by Hamish Imlach, and more recently by The Mary Wallopers.

He began his life in rural Fife, living with his mother and grandparents in a small railwayman’s cottage. His father away at war, young Carl had the freedom to roam, exploring nature, observing the world with curiosity and innocence. It was an idyllic but isolated existence. After the war’s end, Carl’s father returned, beginning the process of slowly building a relationship with his son. One evening he failed to return home from work on the railway. Carl was never explicitly told what happened. His mother inconsolable, he carefully pieced together the misfortune that had occurred.

The family was forced to migrate to Springburn in the industrial north of Glasgow, echoing the migration that Carl’s Gaelic-speaking father had undertaken in his own youth. The single-parent family was poor, the privations of post-war Glasgow brutal. Tragedy visited again and again. Despite showing significant promise, young Carl was failing at school. A target for the bullies because his maternal grandfather was German, he escaped through his friendship with the feral Francie. After the authorities intervened, Carl was separated from both his mother and his friend. Carl had to come to terms with the calamities that had beset his young life if he was to be reunited with those closest to him.

Carl died in April 2023. In his Herald obituary, Dave Manderson commented: ‘His life force was so strong that he seemed indestructible, and it is difficult to believe that his astonishing energy is gone. He may well have had more influence on the Scottish writing scene than any other author. What has never been widely known are the details of Carl’s childhood and the challenges he faced during those years’ – as now revealed in Already, Too Late.