He has written and lectured widely on Scottish literature and cultural identity, and served as General Editor of the Canongate Classics reprint series since the start of the project in 1987.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and is currently the co-editor (with Linda Dryden) of The Journal of Stevenson Studies.
[citation needed] He has published two main volumes of verse over the years, and has featured in numerous periodicals and anthologies.
After an early pamphlet he published his debut work True History on the Walls in 1976, and this was followed by the Luath Press publication Into the Blue Wavelengths in 2004.
Upon its publication it was lauded by Philip Hobsbaum, who labelled Watson as a "poet of introspection and retrospection".