The Centenary Conference 1926 – 2026

Opened by Sir Tom Devine

Presented by Sally Magnusson

“A centenary that comes not to praise MacDiarmid, but to argue with him. ” 

On 22 November 1926, Hugh MacDiarmid published the wildest, most ambitious, most controversial poem in Scottish literature: A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle — 2,685 lines in which a drunk man on a moonlit hillside takes on the thistle, the nation and the universe. It lit the fuse of a “Scottish Renaissance” and helped inspire a national movement. Now, on the eve of the poem’s hundredth birthday, that movement comes under review: a hundred years of argument about culture, politics and nationhood — from the 1920s to the 2020s.

Join Scotland’s leading historians, writers and performers — not to applaud MacDiarmid’s legacy, but to argue over it. Sir Tom Devine opens on the Scotland of the 1920s. Murray Pittock, David Torrance, Pat Kane and Gerda Stevenson debate whether the national movement was born in culture or in politics. Maureen Beattie and W.N. Herbert perform the poem as it should be heard, Patrick Crotty introduces the new Complete Collected Poems, and Deirdre Grieve remembers the man himself. Sally Magnusson presents the day.

Doors: 9am

Conference: 9:30am – 4:30pm

*A light lunch is included in the ticket price.