Our President in 2005/6 was:
James Robertson

James Robertson was born in Kent in 1958, and grew up in Bridge of Allan in Stirlingshire. He studied history at Edinburgh University, at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. His first book of short stories, Close, was published in 1991 by Black & White Publishing. In 1993 he was appointed writer-in-residence at Brownsbank Cottage, the former home of the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, near Biggar in Lanarkshire. During his two-year stay there he published a second book of stories, The Ragged Man's Complaint (1993) and a collection of poems, Sound-Shadow (1995). He also edited the collection of contemporary short stories in Scots, A Tongue in Yer Heid (1994) and two books by the 19th-century geologist and folklorist Hugh Miller. Scottish Ghost Stories appeared in 1996, as did a Dictionary of Scottish Quotations which he co-compiled with Angela Cran. In 1999 he set up the pamphlet imprint Kettillonia, publishing poetry and short fiction by various authors. His own poetry, including I Dream of Alfred Hitchcock (1999), Fae the Flouers o Evil: Baudelaire in Scots (2001) and Stirling Sonnets (2001), has appeared under the Kettillonia imprint. He produced a new edition of the Selected Poems of Robert Fergusson  in 2000 to mark the 250th anniversary of the poet's birth. He is general editor of the Scots language educational imprint Itchy Coo, for which he wrote A Scots Parliament (2002). His first novel, The Fanatic, was published by Fourth Estate in 2000. His second, Joseph Knight, won both the Saltire and Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Awards for 2003-04. In November 2004 he was appointed, through Scottish Book Trust,  as the first writer-in-residence at the Scottish Parliament. The work he produced there was published in 2005 as Voyage of Intent. He lives in Angus.