A tribute to Isla Dewar

Literary Britain, and especially Scotland, will be devastated to learn of the death of Isla Dewar at the relatively young age of seventy-one. These feelings are shared at Sandstone Press where her title, The Cherry Sundae Company, was the first volume in our Sandstone Vista Series for adult learners. Sandstone’s Managing Director Robert Davidson shares these fond memories.

‘Isla was tremendously accessible for such a famous author, friendly, professional and cooperative, yet always in my experience remarkably humble. In the early years of this century, I remember taking a call from her on the West Highland Way on a mobile phone about the size of a small brick. On that call she agreed to become a Vista author, and of course then produced the remarkable Cherry Sundae Company.

‘Later, when she was seeking a new publisher, I met her and her husband, the artist Bob Dewar, in Perth to discuss. It was a lovely meeting, but we were not quite ready for a novelist of her stature at that time. The couple had recently suffered a close family bereavement but went out of their way to be kind to a new publisher with ambitions slightly beyond his reach. Occasional, friendly, contact continued over the following years.

‘She was a fine author, and an inspiration to other authors as well as her many readers. Scotland’s literary scene will be much poorer without her but, of course, her work lives on.’