About Max Scratchmann

Max Scratchmann has been an artist and writer since the late 1970s. He is also a well-known performance poet and speaker.

Max Scratchmann’s father was a Dundonian jute worker employed in the Indian mills, and Max’s early childhood was spent being repeatedly shuttled to and fro Scotland and the Far East before finally coming to rest in Dundee in 1970.

Finding it difficult to fit in with his peers in this ever-changing landscape – and being totally useless at football and organised games of any sort – he quickly took refuge in books and painting, and began his illustrious career in the arts when he sold his first painting at the tender age of seventeen at the Anstruther Annual Art Fair in 1973.

After university Max migrated south and spent much of his adult life in England working in the cut-and-thrust world of freelance illustration for London publishers as diverse as the Wall Street Journal and the Big Issue, but he returned to Scotland in 1999, initially trying his luck as a downshifter in Orkney before eventually settling on the East Coast in 2005.

Max is equally well known for both his lush and darkly intriguing art and his humorous writings; and he was a big hit at the 2013 Edinburgh Festival with his warmly amusing one-man-show, The Last Burrah Sahibs, based on his autobiographical book of the same title.

He is also an accomplished performance poet, being one of the four Inky Fingers’ Poets on a Bus at 2013’s Edinburgh History Festival; and his poem, Snow Globes, was a recent prize winner in the 2014 Dear Scotland international writing contest.

Max Scratchmann currently lives and works in Edinburgh.

You can contact Max at max.scratchmann@btinternet.com