Dame Hilary Mantel is a highly successful writer of historical novels winning the Booker Prize twice, for Wolf Hall 2009, and Bring Up the Bodies. Julian Barnes (1946– ) is another prominent writer and he won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for his book The Sense of an Ending.
The perceived success and promotion of genre fiction authors from Scotland provoked controversy in 2009 when James Kelman criticised, in a speech at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the attention afforded to "upper middle-class young magicians" and "detective fiction" by the "Anglocentric" Scottish literary establishment. .[157]
The theatrical landscape has been reconfigured, moving from a single national theatre at the end of the twentieth-century to four as a result of the devolution of cultural policy