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Someone this week - I honestly forget who - said that Scotland and Canada face similar obstacles in their cultural production: how best to differentiate ourselves from far larger cultural machines to the south.

Beyond that, however, questions of national literature always end in problematic answers. It’s best to let the work talk, as happened today at IFOA’s final Writing Scotland panel.

Hosted by head programmer of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Roland Gulliver, the panel opened prehistorically with Margaret Elphinstone reading from her murder mystery set among Mesolithic Scottish hunter gatherers.

We jumped forward a few thousand years to a Leonard Cohen obsessed schoolteacher attempting, and failing, to have game in Alan Bisset’s Death of a Ladies Man.

Bisset won the crowd with his larkish banter and an animated reading that began with “Happy Halloween Toronto, I’ve come as a Scotsman.” (Bisset was wearing a deconstructed tartan jacket.)

He went on to tell the audience that the international nature of IFOA was in full play the previous night with a party game among the authors consisting of “If your accent was a beast in a forest, how would it run?” In his estimation a Canadian accent is “lolloping” whereas a Scottish accent is “more like a drunken stumble.”