The Scottish author Ali Smith has written a number of books, including The Accidental and How To Be Both. She has been shortlisted four times for the Booker and has won a Costa for best novel, as well as the Goldsmiths, Orwell and Women’s prizes. Her latest novel, Glyph, described as being “family” to Gliff (2024), will be published at the end of January (Hamish Hamilton).

Edwyn Collins: Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation

Could it be that after all The Mountains Are My Home? – which happens to be the name of a beauty of a song on one of the 2025 albums I can’t stop playing: Edwyn Collins’s Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation. Collins’s songs have kept me dancing – and laughing at myself – since Orange Juice’s great first album, You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever, in 1982, and always will. My other repeat-listen recently has been Francesca Michielin, the young Italian pop star, a novelist as well as a fine songwriter. Dove sono gli artisti? Vedo solo populisti (“Where are the artists? All I see are populists”) is a line from a song called Carmen on her last album, Cani Sciolti (loose cannons, or mavericks). Check YouTube for the song called Quello Che Ancora Non C’è (“What’s Not Yet There”), or Vulcano (“Volcano”), or the wicked little short film for Francesca è Impazzita (“Francesca is Insane”), which also happens to feature the fine Italian cinema actor Margherita Buy.  

One Battle After Another (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

I loved Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another; I can’t be the only person to have found herself sitting weeping with hope and sorrow as its final credits rolled to the uplift of Tom Petty’s American Girl. But two films recently stood out for me even beyond this great film. Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36 is an amazing achievement, a slice of history that cuts through to the British roots of 20th-century Middle Eastern anguish. I hope it gets a television slot – but seeing it on the big screen was seeing it as it should be seen, a majestic, gripping, beautifully made piece of cinema. Then there’s Joachim Trier’s astonishing Sentimental Value. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes, and no wonder – it’s a standout film, a brilliantly structured and played story of family, performance, stage fright, neurosis and the unarticulated osmosis that history is, in us all. It’s set in Oslo, and it’s about  – while simultaneously it miraculously demonstrates – how to make an art of reality and why we have art in the first place. 

Debut short story collections by Liadan Ní Chuinn and Jess Gibson

Two great short story collections, both debuts: Every One Still Here by the Irish writer Liadan Ní Chuinn (Granta) is breathtaking. Rooted in the historical inheritances of the Northern Irish Troubles, the stories ask the short story to open, literally and formally, to meet the realities of people’s lives. Then there’s The Good Eye by the Canadian writer Jess Gibson, out later this year from Jonathan Cape. It’s such a good book – Gibson’s own good eye on things is the core of its energy, working beneath every surface “like underwater lamps on television programs about the deep sea”.

Scottish Jazz Fantasies by Matt Carmichael

Soweto Kinch’s wonderful weeknightly Radio 3 programme, ’Round Midnight, gifted me a couple of tracks from the Scottish tenor sax player/composer Matt Carmichael’s collaboration with the WDR (WestDeutscher Rundfunk) Big Band. Since then I’ve been listening on repeat to the complete session; it’s called Scottish Jazz Fantasies. A laid-back, meandering set, its musical roots are deep in something untrammelled, reassuring, very Scottish Highland, a quiet continuity against the odds; in fact the WDR website says it’s verfügbar bis 31.12.2099 – that is, available online for another 73 years …

Culloden (dir. Peter Watkins), iPlayer

The late, great filmmaker Peter Watkins died a few weeks ago. His awe-inspiring documentary-style film Culloden, made for BBC in 1964, is available on iPlayer all January. He was a man of high hopes for the possibilities of film and TV, but the money focus in these industries made no space for his ambition, as he makes clear in the 1990s documentary also now on iPlayer, The Making of Culloden, where he talks about why he chose Culloden as subject in the first place. “Why do we have to crush so-called minority cultures, why?” he says. “And we still do it, and we’re doing it today.” He employed ordinary people as the fighters on the battlefield. “You felt what he felt about war, and what people do to one another. He’s missed,” a man who played an extra says. “We need another Peter Watkins,” says another. Watching Culloden this time I was thanking God we ever had him at all.