Writing for the record

Keith Aitken is best known for his award-winning daily newspaper journalism, but he has also written a great deal over the years for less ephemeral publications.

His magazine work is widespread, and stretches back some three decades. Since its launch in 1995, he has contributed major features to virtually every issue of Scottish Life, the prestigious Massachusetts-based magazine aimed at the expatriate and diaspora Scottish communities throughout North America. He is Scotland Correspondent for London-based Public Finance magazine, having previously been a columnist for Scotland's principal political magazine, Holyrood, and a regular contributor to the respected financial monthly, Scottish Business Insider, where he was for a while associate editor. Other magazines to which he has contributed include the New Statesman, Marxism Today, Scottish Trade Union Review, Scottish Field, Beautiful Britain and a wide array of commercial and business publications. He has also been a successful magazine editor, winning a string of awards for his stewardship of Scottish Enterprise's Enterprise Scotland magazine.

Keith has also written, or co-written, several books and pamphlets. His history of the Scottish labour movement, The Bairns o'Adam (Polygon), was published in 1997 to critical acclaim and has become a standard textbook on its subject. He wrote the massive section on the Scottish economy in Chambers authoritative Anatomy of Scotland in 1992 and, a decade later, brought the topic up to date with a stylish chapter in Anatomy of the New Scotland (Mainstream).

In between times, his knowledge of the Scottish political and economic scene generated two lucid devolution handbooks, How Will Scotland's Parliament Work and Understanding Scotland's Parliament - A Practical Guide for the Cultural Sector (both 1999). Finally, he contributed several trenchant essays to the current Insight Guide to Edinburgh.

Email Keith : keith@kaitken.fsnet.co.uk