The author Kirsty Gunn warned yesterday that Scotland’s literature “has never been in such peril”, blaming funding body Creative Scotland for an “unofficial politicising of literature”.

Writing in Saturday’s Scotsman, Gunn, an award-winning novelist and professor at Dundee University, claimed that the “creative atmosphere” in Scotland is “changing”, with the Scottish National Party running “a whole host of institutions and outposts and advisory bodies that are hell-bent on defining exactly just what Scotland’s culture is and should be”.

Creative Scotland, which distributes funding for the arts in Scotland from the government, is “supposedly independent of party remits”, wrote Gunn. But she pointed to its recent literature and publishing sector review, which spoke of “a strategy rooted in, and of, Scotland’s people and places”. This is an “interesting” and “worthy” idea, Gunn admitted, but questioned if it should “come before notions of intellectual and artistic priority … and the sheer, apolitical idea of ‘art for arts’ sake’”.

We need to be alert now to the tap-tap-tap of the bureaucrats’ computer keys telling us what to write and how Kirsty Gunn

The novelist, who won Scottish book of the year in 1997, criticised Creative Scotland’s stated aim to support projects which “bring benefit to the people in Scotland”, as well as its “championing [of] the ways in which literature and publishing positively impact culture and society in the Scottish context.”

“If one listens to the cadence, attends to the selection of vocabulary in statements such as these, it is clear that Creative Scotland’s outline document overall is setting ground rules for a certain kind of thinking, one that naturalises, in its very language, a controlling sort of agenda for books and poems and stories,” writes Gunn, claiming that “the application process for funding in itself might be regarded as a sort of unofficial politicising of literature – rewarding only those for whom certain bureaucratically-styled admin-friendly terminology is second-speak”.

“Literature, it seems to me, our national literature, has never been in such peril,” she writes, warning that “our great books were never written according to a rule book”, and that “we need to be alert now to the tap-tap-tap of the bureaucrats’ computer keys telling us what to write and how”.

Gunn told the Guardian that her piece, which was commissioned by the Saltire Society and will be published as a pamphlet, had “touched a nerve”.

“A lot of writers and critics and friends have written and said they agree completely,” she said. “I think people think I’ve been quite brave because I’ve spoken out. People have been feeling like this about Creative Scotland for a while ... I and many, many of us are troubled by the increasing ‘Scottification’ of Scotland.”

Gunn received funding from what was then the Scottish Arts Council to write her novel The Big Music, a book inspired by bagpipe music. The Scottish Arts Council became Creative Scotland in 2010, when it merged with Scottish Screen.

There is an agenda of promoting a bullshit ‘Scottishness’ which excludes most of the people who happen to live here Denise Mina, author

In a range of responses gathered by the Scotsman, authors both agreed and disagreed with Gunn’s take. “I think the idea of some sort of ‘crisis’ in our national literature is a slightly artificial one. Like Scotland itself, our literature is a broad political church and we’re having an exciting, ongoing conversation with each other,” said Alan Bissett, while Denise Mina felt that “we have allowed the arts to be co-opted by politics. There is an agenda of promoting a bullshit ‘Scottishness’ which excludes most of the people who happen to live here.”

Gunn said there was likely to be “fallout” from her essay, and that “there’s no way I’ll get funding [from Creative Scotland] in the future”.

“But I think one has to be honest,” she said. “To be an artist is to sit outside the status quo, outside politics and a bureaucratic system and to take risks. I don’t think one should use a political situation to one’s advantage as an artist.”

A spokesperson for Creative Scotland told the Scotsman that “Kirsty Gunn is one of Scotland’s most established and revered writers and we welcome her contribution to ongoing discourse on literature in Scotland”.

“As is the case for all of the art forms that we support, we never seek to influence what artists create. We do, however, have a duty as a distributor of funds from the Scottish government and the National Lottery to support work that delivers benefits for the people of Scotland, whether that be artistic, social or economic,” said the spokesperson. “Our support for literature and publishing in Scotland continues to be extensive, through all our main routes to funding; regular, open and targeted.”