Ewan Morrison

Ewan Morrison (born 1968) is a Scottish author of novels and short stories, cultural critic, screenwriter, and director. His 2019 novel Nina X, published by Fleet — an imprint of Little, Brown and Company, won the Saltire Society Literary Award for fiction book of the year 2019.

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Quotes

Will books, as we know them, come to an end?
Yes, absolutely, within 25 years the digital revolution will bring about the end of paper books. But more importantly, ebooks and e-publishing will mean the end of "the writer" as a profession. Ebooks, in the future, will be written by first-timers, by teams, by speciality subject enthusiasts and by those who were already established in the era of the paper book. The digital revolution will not emancipate writers or open up a new era of creativity, it will mean that writers offer up their work for next to nothing or for free. Writing, as a profession, will cease to exist.
- (22 August 2011) "Are books dead, and can authors survive? At the Edinburgh international book festival this weekend, Ewan Morrison set out his bleak vision of a publishing industry in terminal decline". The Guardian.

We like to think we're free in the free market; that we're beyond the forces of advertising and social manipulation by market forces. But there is a new social trend — the rise of 'the single person' as model consumer — that presents us with a paradox. What we once thought of as radical — staying single - may now be reactionary.
The long-term relationship, like the job-for-life, is fast being deregulated into short term, temporary arrangements with no promise of commitment, as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has been warning us for over a decade. It's hard for two people to be self-employed, with no promise of a stable future, together. Capitalism now wants us to be single.
- (11 August 2012) "Ewan Morrison: what I'm thinking about ... why capitalism wants us to stay single. 'Now that the market is cashing in on the buying power of single people, the radical choice is to get married'". The Guardian. (See Zygmunt Bauman.)

Communal living: Plato recommended it, 19th-century religious separatists tried it, anarchists and hippies spectacularly failed at it. Attempting to live with no private property an all goods in common (which may even include sexual partners) has been a recurring utopian experiment.
It's supposed to erase greed and create equality. You'd think that this important subject would have created a vast body of literature, but you'd be wrong. Novels about communes are very rare and this might be because the ideal of "the communal" is at loggerheads with the bias towards "the individual" in the novel. But there are some gems, which are important documents of a noble, failed, social experiment.
- (11 December 2013) "Ewan Morrison's top 10 books about communes. From brainwashing to tree hugging to mandatory sexual sharing, the author shares his favourites from a tiny genre full of big ideas". The Guardian.