Want fewer ads?

Tom Morton (born December 31, 1955) is a Scottish writer, broadcaster, and musician. He lives and works mainly in the Shetland Islands.

Morton currently (2009) has a BBC Radio Scotland music show, broadcast each weekday afternoon. He has written several books, including a biography of the Gaelic rock band Runrig, a whisky travelogue called Spirit of Adventure, and several critically acclaimed novels. A spy novel called Serpentine was published in the UK in 2009 and in the USA and Canada the following year. For many years, he worked as a print journalist, as a columnist with the Daily and Sunday Express, Scotland on Sunday, The Big Issue in Scotland, The Shetland Times, and as a staff reporter with national newspaper The Scotsman.

Born in Carlisle, Cumberland, England, but brought up by his Scottish family in Glasgow and Troon, Ayrshire, Morton's early years were characterised by committed evangelical Christianity which he alluded to in the novel Red Guitars in Heaven. Heavily involved in religious music during the 1970s and early 80s, he released several albums and toured as a full-time evangelical singer. The evangelical period of Morton's life ended in 1984: a change referenced in several of his books.

His subsequent career included writing reviews and features for the defunct rock weekly Melody Maker, and working as a producer and presenter in religious TV. A move to the Shetland Islands in 1987 saw his appointment as news editor of The Shetland Times, and the subsequent formation of the islands' first freelance news agency.Appointment as Highlands and Islands Reporter with The Scotsman led to four years with the paper before a return to Shetland and more freelance work. He has continued to work sporadically in television, with the Discovery Home and Leisure series Village Green, about ecological housing, and three series of the STV motoring programme Wheelnuts.

His radio work began in 1992 on BBC Radio Scotland. In 2006 he released a CD of original musical material, mainly self-conscious meditations on the perils of being an ageing rock'n'roll fan. He blogs regularly.

Morton pioneered the use of ISDN digital telephone technology to broadcast nationally from his home in the Shetland Islands. For several years his radio show came mostly from The Radiocroft, an ISDN-equipped crofthouse in the remote north of Shetland's mainland. However, in December 2008, after months of unreliability, the local exchange was struck by lightning during a broadcast and the Tom Morton show went off air. A decision was taken to move the show permanently to the BBC studios in Lerwick, at local radio station BBC Radio Shetland.

Morton has returned to live performance with the Malt and Barley Revue a musical show about whisky. He has a blog about alcohol called Drinking for Scotland. The full-length thriller Serpentine, set in Palestine, Scotland and Northern Ireland, was published in June 2009 by Mainstream Publishing. He writes about whisky for several publications and co-wrote the privately-published (2009) book Journey's Blend, about a charity motorcycle trip around Scotland's most geographically extreme distilleries.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Tom Morton", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0