Writing Divided: can you tell a Scottish novelist from an English one?

The First Minister says it is always possible to tell the difference between the work of a Scottish novelist and an English one. Here, two leading writers debate the issue – and we set our readers a challenge

IT MIGHT seem like a parlour game, but in a way working out if you can tell a writer is Scottish just by reading what he or she has written goes right to the heart of what nationalism is about.

If you can tell who is a Scottish and who is an English writer just by detecting a particular cast of a creative mind behind their words, the argument is simple, crisp and clean. On this basis, Scots and English writers – and by implication, the Scots and English themselves – are as distinct as apples and oranges.

In a recent interview, First Minister Alex Salmond said Scotland had a culture that was distinct and quite separate from England. "Unionism hasn't been based on culture. Obviously there is the same language albeit with different accents, but you couldn't get two more different cultures," he said. "Nobody would mistake a Scottish novelist for an English novelist."

Ah, but can you? Are Scots and English really as predictable as that, so much so that their writers' novels can be so easily categorised? Can a writer's mind be so irredeemably "Scottish by formation" – to use Muriel Spark's famous phrase – that no matter how densely it has been overlaid by the experience of living anywhere else, its fundamental Scottishness should be always remain so clearly discernible?

But are our writers – and, behind that, the deeper question are we ourselves – really so different north and south of the Border? Aren't our writers – people whose job is to make things up for a living – the very last people whose minds we should be able to gauge for their relative degrees of Scottishness or Englishness? Isn't suggesting they could be so easily told apart almost like saying that Scottish actors are incapable of putting on an English accent – or vice versa?

Of course, a writer can be expected to look closely at his or her own people. That's part of their job. But can style, craft and imagination ever carry such clear nationalistic tags of attribution too?

On these pages, two acclaimed Scottish writers take up positions on either side of the debate. Andrew Crumey takes issue with the notion that English novelists can always be told apart from their Scottish colleagues by what they write. Ron Butlin, for his part, argues that there is a difference between them – and it's one worth celebrating.

One final thought. That most English of novelists, Dame Agatha Christie, was once asked what she thought of that most Scottish one, Dame Muriel Spark. "If I could write like her," she said, "I should jump to heaven with delight."

But did Spark write like she did because she was Scottish – or is the whole notion that our minds can be categorised by nationality just a load of nonsense? You decide…

AGREE - Ron Butlin: 'We really cannot mistake them as novelists from anywhere else'

ALEX Salmond's remark about nobody mistaking a Scottish novelist for an English one works both ways - and should be celebrated by us all, whichever side of the Border we live on, as all good novels emerge from their native culture.

That is important because it gives a novel depth. Without it, novels would be like a collection of maps that refer to all landscapes equally, or to none at all. Shoddy novels are like this - they have no real context and no significance to anything or anywhere. With no sense of personality, let alone national identity, they often seem written in a kind of universal Google-speak that could mean anything or nothing.

Thankfully, there's more to being a Scottish novelist than being born north of the Border. Forget the 50 words they have for rain and the three languages to shout the odds in, their Scottishness runs deep. Recently it has become crucial to us all.

Alasdair Gray could never be mistaken for an English novelist - just as Dickens created literary London and Balzac Paris, Gray has made Glasgow come alive to the rest of the world, and to us. Like it or not, we recognise the truth of Unthank as our own.

We have the different Edinburghs of Alexander McCall Smith, Irvine Welsh and Ian Rankin, and visions of Scotland adrift in the deep space of Iain Banks, with or without the M.

Let's imagine that James Kelman suddenly revealed to us that he is English. Not a word of his works are changed - the same fractured characters still struggle to discover their dignity amid the same everyday disillusionment and despair. But something would feel very different, wouldn't it? After we'd recovered from the initial surprise, we might find ourselves saying: "Doesn't this Englishman do the voices well!" But we'd be wondering why on Earth he hadn't located his characters in England. From there it would be only a short step to questioning the integrity of his work and the author's real understanding of what he's writing about.

For most of its history Scotland has been a country, but only just, and lack of self-belief was branded onto the Scottish heart at birth. Until recently, that is. With devolution, a spring has been put into our step - we're exploring the possibilities of self-confidence. We've become political adolescents - grown up, but not quite. Whatever, we're certainly cultivating attitude!

At some level - whether obliquely, as in Janice Galloway's Clara, where the fight for Clara Schumann's self-determination is central, or in James Robertson's prize-winning novel And the Land Lay Still, where Scotland itself is the main character - these vital issues of our culture are being examined by Scottish writers.

The politics of this sea-change in our history is too important to be left to party politicians, nor can the arts be entrusted wholesale to mouse-click bureaucrats. Today, as never before, Scottish novelists are speaking to us with real urgency.

We really cannot mistake them as novelists from anywhere else, nor ignore the importance of what they have to tell to us.

• Novelist and poet Ron Butlin is Edinburgh's Makar

DISAGREE - Andrew Crumey: 'Great art serves to bring down boundaries, not raise them'

THE First Minister reportedly believes nobody would mistake a Scottish novelist for an English one.

Quite a claim, considering that people have been arguing for years about whether you can tell without prior knowledge if a writer is male or female, black or white, gay or straight. Countless readers have been fooled. Novelists and politicians share one thing: they're good at making things up. If you can work out everything about a novelist from their novels, they're surely doing something wrong.

As a boy, reading The Hound Of The Baskervilles, I had no idea that the creator of Sherlock Holmes was born in Edinburgh. No doubt an expert could find some tell-tale sign, but how is the average reader supposed to know that a story about a London-based detective working on a case in Dartmoor was actually written by a Scot?

Alex Salmond's remark was an off-the-cuff comment by someone who has far more important things to think about than novels. More significant, though, is the false premise it rests upon: that a novelist may be English or Scottish, but not both. What about Arthur Conan Doyle? For most of his life he lived in England. If the English want to claim him as one of theirs, they surely have every right.

We do it ourselves. A few years ago, some pundits put together a list of the "100 Best Scottish Books". It included George Orwell's 1984, on the basis that Orwell wrote it while living on Jura. Other Scottish residents who made it onto the list were JK Rowling (born in Gloucestershire), and Bernard MacLaverty (born in Belfast). By the same reckoning, a list of England's best writers could include Ali Smith and Jackie Kay, who both live there.

All of which leaves the idea that you can tell a "Scottish" novelist just by reading them a bit up in the air. No, the way to identify a Scottish novelist is to check out their biography and see if they have a Scottish connection.

Go to Berlin, ask what sort of writer Kafka was, and you'll be told he was German. In Jerusalem, the answer would be Jewish. In this country we think of Kafka as Czech, though the country he was born in was Bohemia, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The first English translations of his novels were by Edwin and Willa Muir, so maybe The Trial should have been in that list of "100 Best Scottish Books". (t included Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness since it was first serialised by Blackwood's Magazine in Edinburgh.)

Every nation has a right to be proud of its cultural products. None has a right to exclusive ownership. To call a novelist or anyone else Scottish does not mean they cannot also be English. So why the urge to find Scottishness in Orwell or Conrad? Because they are writers of internationally recognised value, and we'd like some of their fame.

That is perfectly forgivable, but the only people likely to be impressed are the Scots.

So let's congratulate ourselves on how wonderful we are, and be careful not to turn domestic self-esteem into triumphalism.

When you read any novel you can't be sure if the writer is Scottish, English, both or neither. What you can decide for yourself is whether or not the book is any good. Cultural figures will always be used as political footballs by people whose agenda is not primarily artistic. But great art serves to bring down boundaries, not raise them.

• Andrew Crumey's latest novel is Sputnik Caledonia