A new memorial celebrating novelist Dame Muriel Spark (1918-2006) is set to be established in Princes Street Gardens.
The Spirit of Spark memorial project will launch a competition to design the memorial on 19 November 2025, with completion scheduled for 2027.
The Edinburgh-born novelist and short story writer was best known for her absurdist flair and darkly comic novels.
Many of Spark’s novels feature on the English Literature syllabus at the University of Edinburgh, including “The Driver’s Seat”, a subversive crime novel breaking the conventions of the ‘whodunnit’ genre at the time and dealing with themes of gender based violence.
Given Spark’s widespread acclaim, the project to commemorate Spark and her work has been a long-standing initiative of philanthropists Morag and James Anderson, who have fully funded the project.
The memorial marks a historically significant moment as Spark will be the first woman in Princes Street Gardens’s 200-year history to be commemorated in the area.
Spark’s memorial will be situated alongside Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott, a homage to Scotland’s foremost literary figures.
Spark’s “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1961), set at a school in Edinburgh and possibly based on her own education at James Gillespie’s School for Girls, is often considered her most celebrated work and has been subsequently adapted for the screen and stage.
An advocate for pushing literary boundaries and conventions, Spark’s memorial commemorates her profound literary legacy and core belief that “Art is an act of daring.”
“Princes Street Gardens” by Bernt Rostad is licensed under CC BY 2.0.