Aspirations and values...

...Robert Crawford: 'The only major English novel set in Scotland is To the Lighthouse'

He married the academic Alice Crawford in 1988 and they have two children, but, he says, for a time they didn't think they'd be able to have children "and I found that difficult as I wanted very much to become a father". He addresses the subject in his 1996 collection, Masculinity, "at a time when there was much talk of damaged masculinity in Scottish writing in books such as Trainspotting. I wanted to do something different and I was glad to get those poems out. Poetry has to talk about love, although, as quite a repressed person in some ways, I initially found it easier to write erotic poetry in Scots, partly because I thought it would be safer if people didn't understand exactly what was going on."