• 2008 Creative Scotland Award
• 1995 McVitie’s Writer of the Year Award, for Something Very Like Murder
• 1984 Scottish Arts Council Book Award, for A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty
• 1972 AKROS Hugh Macdiarmid 80th Birthday Poetry Competition

Poetry

Non-Fiction

Fiction

A God's Breakfast is three books in one. The first and longest is "The Uninvited Guest", a sequence of hundreds of cod-classical epigrams and fragments; the third, "What Else is There?" a collection of 120 shorter poems. The rest of the volume is given up to "West Åland, or Five Tombeaux for Mr Testoil". At 48 pages, "West Åland" is about as long as The Waste Land and Four Quartets combined and is, I'd reckon, the most protracted dance ever made by one poet upon the grave of another.