James Robertson (born 1958) is a Scottish writer who is the author of several novels, short stories and poetry collections.
He has published seven novels: The Fanatic, Joseph Knight, The Testament of Gideon Mack, And the Land Lay Still, The Professor of Truth, and To Be Continued… and News of the Dead.
Robertson also runs an independent publishing company called Kettillonia, and is a co-founder (with Matthew Fitt and Susan Rennie) and general editor of the Scots language imprint Itchy Coo (produced by Black & White Publishing), which produces books in Scots for children and young people.
His early short stories and first novel used contemporary and historical life in Edinburgh as a key theme, drawing on his experience of living there intermittently while working on his PhD and during the later 1990s before moving to Fife, and subsequently Angus.
Joseph Knight is based on the true story of a slave brought from the Caribbean to Scotland, and the novel revolves primarily around the cities of Dundee, near where Robertson was then living, and Edinburgh.
Katie’s Moose won the early years category in the Royal Mail Awards for Scottish Children's Books 2007.
The anthology, Why Willows Weep, has so far helped The Woodland Trust plant approximately 50,000 trees, and is to be re-released in paperback format in 2016.
[2] He has also cited Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Don DeLillo, Raymond Carver, Flann O’Brien and Flannery O’Connor as important literary influences.