A NOVEL depicting a 14-year-old boy's homosexual awakening in Galloway has won Scotland's top literary prize.
Ronald Frame's The Lantern Bearers was awarded the #5000 Saltire Society book of the year prize at a ceremony in the National Library of Scotland, in Edinburgh.
Frame, a 47-year-old Glaswegian, has already won awards for both his television and radio plays.
The writer was also awarded the Betty Trask prize for fiction for his first of 12 novels.
The Lantern Bearers, set in Galloway and Glasgow and published by Duckworth, is being adapted for film by Frame in collaboration with Scottish Screen.
Frame beat off a strong shortlist which comprised: Stolen Light (Bloodaxe) by Stewart Conn, The World's Wife (Picador) by Carol Ann Duffy, Collected Poems and Songs (Curly Snake) by Hamish Henderson, No Great Mischief (Cape) by Alastair MacLeod, and Nero's Heirs (Sceptre) by Allan Massie.
Picador's investment in a #100,000 advance for Douglas Galbraith has paid off in the critical reception for The Rising Sun, which won the #1500 Post Office/Saltire first book of the year.
Others on the shortlist were: The Translator (Polygon) by Leila Aboulela, Sitting Among the Eskimos (Review) by Maggie Graham, The Big House (Bloomsbury) by Helena McEwen, and Smuaintean fo Eiseabhal (Birlinn) by Donald MacDonald.
The #1500 National Library of Scotland/Saltire research book of the year was won by Isobel Murray, reader in English at Aberdeen University, for Jessie Kesson: Writing Her Life (Canongate).
The other shortlisted titles were: Bho Chluaidh gu Calsraid (From the Clyde to Callander) by Michael Newton, and published by Acair, The Highland Pipe and Scottish Society 1750-1950 (Tuckwell) by William Donaldson, History Education in Scotland (John Donald) by Peter Hillis, and Screening Scotland (British Film Institute).
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