Alistair Moffat

A prominent figure in Scottish public life since the 1970s, the writer, journalist and broadcaster Alistair Moffat is the author of some 30 books, the majority of them about his country’s history and culture. ...

Moffat was born in 1950 and grew up in the historic market town of Kelso in the Border county of Roxburghshire. A keen rugby player, he studied Medieval History at St Andrew’s and went on to take an MPhil at London University.

He was appointed Director of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1976 – a job that gave rise to his first book, a history of the Fringe, in 1978 – and went on to join Scottish Television in 1981, rising to become Director of Programmes. In 2004 he founded the annual Borders Book Festival in Melrose, and from 2011 to 2013 served as Rector of St Andrew’s University.

Alistair Moffat’s many books include the bestselling histories Tyneside (2005), The Reivers (2007) and The Wall (2008), all of which have been made into television series; The Faded Map: The Story of the Lost Kingdoms of Scotland (2010); and Hawick: A History from Earliest Times (2014).

A broader history, Scotland: A History from Earliest Times, appeared the following year. Bringing together facts and myths, and the experiences of a variety of people, the large-scale project spans the country’s change from prehistory to the independence referendum.

More recently, for In Search of Angels (2020), Moffat travelled by ferry through the Hebrides to find the traces of the early Irish monks who came there in search of solitude in which to commune with God. The following year he turned his attention closer to home – The Secret History of Here (2021) explores the archaeology of the farm near Selkirk that he and his wife Lindsay bought in the early 1990s. His latest book, Scotland’s Forgotten Past: A History of the Mislaid, Misplaced and Misunderstood, was published by Thames & Hudson in January 2023.

‘What always attracts people, or attracts me anyway,’ he told The Herald newspaper in 2021, ‘is that genius loci, the spirit of a place.’