In 1947, Alison Sheppard, the Saltire Society's then honorary secretary, argued that ‘Scottishness’ alone was not enough for the Society, continuing to argue that ‘far too much inferior work was acclaimed, simply because it was Scottish’. Despite this proclamation (made over a decade after the founding of the Society in 1936) suggesting that there was a risk of the organisation's attentions being distracted by ‘inferior work’ because of a preoccupation with Scottish work, it was, and remains, impossible to detach the Society's founding principles from Scotland and ‘Scottishness’. The organisation's status as a cultural charity, located in Scotland's capital city and dedicated to supporting and promoting Scottish cultural life, means engagement with notions of Scottish national identity and nationhood – and how this should be defined and supported – is intrinsic to the Society's activities. This, inevitably, feeds into how the Society facilitates their series of Literary Awards and how the award judges and shortlisted/winning authors and their publishers understand the awards. As previously noted, to be eligible for a Saltire Society Literary Award, an author must have a genetic or geographical connection to Scotland, or their work must have a clear contextual relation to Scotland through subject matter, setting or character. Such terms not only have a practical purpose, acting as a form of sifting process by which it is decided whether a book should or should not be considered for the Literary Awards, but they also have an ideological purpose. They are a means by which the Society can articulate what it considers to be representative of ‘Scottishness’ and Scottish cultural identity.

Debates regarding what exactly Scottish cultural identity is have emerged, and re-emerged, for centuries. Indeed, such arguments are historical and political in origin, relating to Scotland's contentious relationship with England from the Acts of Union 1707, which saw the political unification of Scotland and England, to the more recent 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum, which saw Scotland unsuccessfully seek political and economic independence from the United Kingdom. As already described in Part I, this historical context is important when considering the Saltire Society, its literary awards and their contribution to Scottish cultural and literary life, since the Society was founded between, and inspired by, two so-called cultural renaissances in Scottish politics and culture.