Kenneth Roy

Kenneth Roy (26 March 1945 – 5 November 2018) was a Scottish journalist, writer and broadcaster.

Roy was born in Falkirk. His father, an engineer, and mother, an office worker, were involved in amateur theatre there. He attended Denny High School and, at the age of 13, began contributing to the Falkirk Mail as its Bonnybridge correspondent.

He worked for a short time with the Greenock evening paper before, at the age of 19, he joined the Glasgow Herald, which assigned him to cover the criminal courts. After leaving the paper, he worked in public relations. He then moved to Edinburgh, where he published the magazine Scottish Theatre (1969 - 1973).

Roy left the BBC in 1979 and established the 'Maybole consortium' which brought West Sound on air in the autumn of 1981 from studios in Ayr. Afterwards, he set up a company, to publish the biographical reference annual, Who's Who in Scotland, and returned to BBC Scotland as presenter of the weekly politics programme, Agenda. When Scotland on Sunday was launched in 1988 he became the paper's television critic and sketch writer. He then moved to The Observer, where he contributed a series of observational pieces entitled 'Kenneth Roy's Britain'. He also contributed a weekly commentary on current affairs to The Herald, and a daily notebook, 'Kenneth Roy's Pocket Companion', on the back page of The Scotsman.

In 2000, Roy established the non-political Institute of Contemporary Scotland (ICS) as a social and cultural counterpoint to the recently re-established Scottish Parliament.

Towards the end of his career he wrote two personal accounts of post-war Scotland, The Invisible Spirit (2013), which dealt with the period 1945 to 1975, and The Broken Journey (2016), which continued the story to 1999.