Duncan McLean (writer)

Duncan McLean (born 1964) is a Scottish novelist, playwright, and short story writer.

Duncan McLean was born in Fraserburgh and has lived in Orkney since 1992. While based in Edinburgh in the 1980s, he started writing songs, stand-up routines, and plays for the Merry Mac Fun Co, a street theatre and comedy act with agitprop tendencies. The Merry Macs won various awards, and were twice nominated for the Perrier Comedy Award.

In the 1990s McLean was part of a loose grouping of writers centred on Edinburgh whose characters were mainly poor, working class and young, whose themes were drugs, drink, dance music, violence and alienation, and who took their inspiration variously from the Glaswegian writers of the previous generation, notably James Kelman, and from overseas writers like Richard Brautigan and Knut Hamsun. Among the so-called "Beats of Edinburgh", besides McLean, were Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner and Gordon Legge, along with the publisher Kevin Williamson.

In December 1990, with the writer James Meek, McLean set up and ran the Clocktower Press, a small but influential publishing house, which helped bring a new generation of Scottish writers to wider attention. McLean, Meek and the artist Eddie Farrell invested £50 each to print the first booklet, Safe/Lurch, with both writers contributing a story and Farrell illustrating the cover. After the first three booklets Meek moved to Kiev and McLean went on to publish seven more, including the first separately-published extracts of what would later become Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. The fifth of the Clocktower series, it was printed in April 1992 in an edition of 300 under the title Past Tense: four stories from a novel.

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