Join us for a very special in conversation celebrating Scottish art and LGBTQ+ history as Damian Barr, award-winning writer, broadcaster and journalist, and Alice Strang, expert art historian, curator and auctioneer, talk about Damians beautifully researched and stunningly reimagined novel, The Two Roberts. Inspired by the real and wild lives of working-class Ayrshire boys, Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, the novel tells the profoundly moving story of the devotion and obsessions of two artists, lovers and outsiders from their meeting at Glasgow School of Art in 1933 to wartime London.
If you have any questions about the event, please contact the Art and Design Library atcentral.artanddesign.library@edinburgh.gov.uk or phone us on 0131 242 8040.
Copies of The Two Roberts will be on sale at the event thanks to the support of Lighthouse Bookshop.https://lighthousebookshop.com/
Damian Barr is an award-winning writer, broadcaster and journalist. His memoir Maggie & Me , won Stonewall Writer of the Year and Sunday Times Memoir of the Year. His debut novel, You Will Be Safe Here , was shortlisted for six major awards. He brought books back to TV with the Big Scottish Book Club, which was syndicated internationally. He has written columns for The Times and Sunday Times , has hosted Front Row on BBC Radio 4 as well as own series Guide Books, and on BBC TV, he presented Shelf Isolation and the landmark documentary for Sir Walter Scotts 250th.
Damian holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His world-famous Literary Salon ran from 2008 to 2023, celebrating writers from around the world and widening the cultural conversation. He is a trustee of Gladstones Library and a campaigner for libraries.
Alice Strang is a Modern and Contemporary Art Curator and Art Historian. Following twenty-two years as a Senior Curator at the National Galleries of Scotland she is now an Associate Director of Lyon & Turnbull auctioneers. Alice is a Saltire Society Outstanding Woman of Scotland, a BBC Expert Woman. She is also a Founding Trustee of the Lund Humphries Foundation for Visual Arts, whose books about modern and contemporary British art will be familiar to many library members. Edinburgh City Libraries' Fountainbridge Library was the subject of one of her favourite research and lecture projects. Alice often called upon to negotiate loans from private collections to public exhibitions, including to Damian Barr's current Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun: Artists, Lovers, Outsiders exhibition at Charleston in Lewes, East Sussex.
This event forms part of Edinburgh Libraries' activities for National Year of Reading 2026 [https://goallin.org.uk/]. The National Year of Reading is a transformative national initiative designed to reignite a culture of reading for pleasure across the UK. The National Year of Reading aims to make reading joyful, relevant and visible for all - in homes, classrooms, workplaces and communities.