Kettillonia is an independent publisher based in Angus, Scotland. We aim to put into print original, adventurous, neglected and rare writing. We have a special interest in writing from Scotland or with a Scottish connection, and in work in the Scots and Gaelic languages.
Established in 1999 by poet and novelist James Robertson, Kettillonia's list is diverse and, we hope, diverting: poems and stories from the Hilltown in Dundee; the relative merits of python-wrestling and spaghetti hoops discoursed upon in medieval Scots; Horace updated and relocated to modern Edinburgh; a dual Gaelic/Scots vision of the Day of Judgment; Alfred Hitchcock's most notorious scenes revisited in verse; a childhood in Fife; Baudelaire in Scots; the forgotten verse of the greatest female poet Scotland has so far produced (according to Hugh MacDiarmid); the short stories of a Hollywood scriptwriter, so shocking to the Aberdeenshire village of her birth that they banned them from the public library; the unassuming but strangely beautiful lives of Mr and Mrs Philpott; a future Scotland nine-tenths underwater and described in 21st-century Scots; a poetry collection where Zen Calvinism, the Bible and Space Invaders interface; poems celebrating the forgotten workers of hospitals; reminiscences of growing up in Edinburgh in the 1950s; poetry in which the wizard Michael Scott takes on the Devil; eighteen portraits of men in love and without love...
Kettillonia's first full-length book, published in 2010, was a selection of the work of the Guatemalan poet Humberto Ak'abal in English and Scots translation. This was followed in 2012 by the selected poems of Eunice Buchanan in As Far As I Can See, which was joint-winner of the Saltire Society's First Book of the Year award. More recently Kettillonia has produced, in pamphlet form, stunning new English versions by Alan Riach of two long 18th-century Gaelic poems. We publish only occasionally, and only what we think is of the highest quality. Many of our titles sell out quickly, and some have gone on to become collectors' items.