Near the end of Michael Pedersen’s Boy Friends, a 2022 ‘memoir of joy, grief and male friendship’, he details first encountering the Muckle Flugga Lighthouse. The Portobello poet had travelled to Shetland in order to assist KLF icon Bill Drummond with a film being presented in a community centre on Unst but returned with the germination of an idea that would bloom into assuredly one of the key Scottish books of this year. 

‘The idea for a lighthouse novel was sort of bouncing around my bread box for years,’ he tells me in typically breathless and lyrical style within the sanctum of his shared Edinburgh University office where he plots and performs his duties as the academic centre’s writer-in-residence. ‘It’s sort of shape-shifted like the island itself, became amorphous and swirled around into different incarnations. It was really over the period of touring Boy Friends that I solidified on the idea for a friendship love story. The characters started speaking to me as I started to think about different people I’ve met and the friendships they had.’

What he’d learned from those comradeships eventually became inhabited in his two lead characters, Firth and Ouse. The former is an Edinburgh journalist who begins the book attempting to kill himself but eventually makes it over to Muckle Flugga to rent out a room in the lighthouse where he soon clears his head and recalibrates his life. The latter is the talented but thwarted son who helps to maintain this grand edifice while existing under a reign of quasi-tyranny enforced by his widower dad (aka The Father). The pair become close pals, with Firth holding out a promise to Ouse of a future career and life enhancement should he relocate to the nation’s capital. Oh, it should be mentioned at this point that Ouse also has regular briefings with ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’. 

If you feel that those lead character names might suggest a certain watery connection, then you feel correctly. Across the book’s 300 pages there’s also a Nile, Gary and Shannon while the more enigmatic choice of character title in Figgie refers to the nickname of a burn which crossed two parks in Pedersen’s Portobello when he was growing up. ‘This is an island-based novel and there are so many currents and tides and vicissitudes of weather going through it that I felt the characters had to be in some way connected with bodies of water too. There’s quite a few little cryptic swirls in the book that are sort of for me, but that I think also serve the story. The majority of readers will whistle past some clues but those diving a bit deeper will uncover them.’ 

It’s hard to bring this up but is the character of Firth partly tapping into his memories of Scott Hutchison, the Frightened Rabbit frontman, a friend and collaborator (Hutchison provided illustrations for Pedersen’s 2017 poetry collection, Oyster), who did end his life in the waters near South Queensferry in May 2018? Their friendship and Pedersen’s attempts to reach some kind of equilibrium with his pal’s death is the achingly moving yet often life-affirming core of Boy Friends.

‘I guess it’s an emotional connection to what myself and a lot of people went through at that point in time. I wanted to meet a character, who’s in no way based on Scott, at his lowest ebb, hanging off the side of this bridge, this metal monster, and I wanted to pull him back from the abyss. I wanted them to find a reason to keep on living and to see him fighting his way back into the light. It’s a manifestation of all the moments I went through with Scott’s leaving, so of course I’m aware of the comparisons. It was the biggest thing that had happened to me emotionally from a grief perspective; it left this cataclysmic gap and I guess I’ll always be searching for ways to understand that. Writing this character that took themselves back down off the bridge was almost gifting myself some form of resolution.’

Our conversation darts around a variety of subjects such as the top-tier Scottish actor who is all set to become the narrator of the Muckle Flugga audio book (‘unless he gets named the new Bond’ before they are able to bundle him into a recording studio); dream casting for any possible film of the book (Capaldi, McAvoy or Carlyle as The Father?); looking Stateside and thanking our lucky stars for literary freedoms here (‘like anywhere, there’s more to be done but we’re in a nurtured place in the UK’); going too long without writing a poem (‘it would niggle me’); attending literary festivals and hoping that his hotel has a swimming pool (‘I’ve always got my trunks on me just in case’); and, of course his warm feelings about lighthouses (‘they’re beautiful, aren’t they? They’re sort of lampposts of the sea; these great watchtowers. They stand like giants’).

Ahead of the book’s publication, there are contractual obligations to be met and writerly duties to be performed. One of which requires him to head to a cavernous building in Kent and sign books. Potentially not at his own good pace though, if the venue’s bosses have their way. ‘I’ll go to the big Faber warehouse and sign a few thousand copies of them. I love doing that though, seeing them en masse and thinking about all the readers that they’re going out to; it’s a pretty euphoric experience. I got told off, actually, when I was doing Boy Friends because I was loving it so much that I bought three different coloured inks and a stamp; they pulled aside the Faber rep and said “look, normally we expect writers to do about 250 books an hour and Michael is averaging 70 to 75”. So, they sort of de-sheathed me and took a couple of colours and my stamp off me. I got them back for the final 50. When you buy a signed book I don’t want it to look like there’s a bit of spilt biro on there. I want people to know that this has been worked on.’

No one could ever accuse Michael Pedersen of being a slacker. He has an energy and brio (one of his favourite words) that is totally infectious, and anyone still harbouring stereotypical images of the ‘stuffy old author’ can be dismissed and demolished when confronted with his verve. ‘Rabblerouser’ is a spiky noun he’s had hurled at him, one he is happy to catch in his mitt. You wouldn’t find Pedersen burning a million quid like his pal Bill Drummond, but the Neu! Reekie! literary production house that he co-ran with Kevin Williamson between 2010 and 2022 eventually became known for breaking down the barriers between high and low art and trying to make non-mainstream culture widely available to all. ‘I love to ruffle feathers,’ Pedersen insists. ‘You can’t provoke change any other way.’

He views such ruffling as very much part of his remit as both the newly anointed Edinburgh Makar (that role runs until 2027) while his Edinburgh University writer-in-residence gig expires this summer at which point he will fully fling himself into the mayhem that is his city’s Festival month. ‘The first thing I did as Edinburgh Makar was to launch a poetry prize in order to get more young people writing poetry and which was only taken into state schools: my old school, Portobello, plus Leith Academy and Craigroyston. Those schools have a higher degree of students that need more help getting their literacy levels up. I knew I wanted to go to these schools first and I’ll grow that every year. The most important element of this Makar role to me will be getting more young kids feeling like they have access to literature. I’m offering people an inlet into writing what can be quite soppy, sentimental, vulnerable stuff. It’s not exactly burning down the Parliament but it’s hopefully a benevolent offer.’

Muckle Flugga is published on Thursday 22 May; Michael Pedersen is on tour until Saturday 19 July.