Philip Dundas grew up adopted,
on a farm in rural Scotland
with a walled garden,
and books.

He has spent the decades since working out what to do with all of it — as a waiter, a music industry press agent, a BBC producer, a restaurant owner, a gardener, a novelist, a food writer and, now, a memoirist writing at a kitchen table in New York’s West Village.

Philip Dundas

Latest from A Boy in the Kitchen

4 March 2026
On Being the Lead Husky
The secrets Golding knew about British schools.
Read on Substack →
5 February 2026
Everything Stops for Tea
On tea, routine, and time standing still.
Read on Substack →
7 January 2026
Mr Rochester Comes to Lunch
As a boy, I liked meeting strangers, especially adults.
Read on Substack →

The Book

Clype

Clype

In Scots, a clype is a grass, an informer, a prattle — a child who tells on people, who cannot keep the secret in. It is also a word that can be turned in the hand like a stone, catching the light differently each time. To clype is to betray. Or to tell the truth. Depending on who is asking.

The title came from a psychiatric report commissioned by the defence — a friendly, disarming document designed to suggest that Philip was exaggerating what happened to him and its impact. The psychiatrist noted, approvingly, that he was well-groomed and articulate. A raconteur. Someone who enjoyed the conversation. What the report was really asking, in its careful professional way, was whether he was a reliable witness. Whether he was telling tales. Philip read it and thought: yes. That is precisely what this book is. Here is my evidence.

Clype begins with the death of Philip’s mother and ends with his abusers finally facing justice. In between is a life: a walled Scottish garden and what it taught him, a school that did lasting damage, growing up gay in the early AIDS years, the wilderness decades of the music business and the clubs, Oxford as a mature student, a restaurant, a gardening business built when everything else had broken down, and the long, slow, irreversible process of becoming honest about all of it.

It is a book about what a person carries when they cannot speak, and what happens — to them, and to others — when they finally do.

Forthcoming

Writing

He has written on lifestyle and culture for a range of newspapers.

As a food writer, Philip was represented by Maggie Hanbury.

He is the author of Cooking Without Recipes (Little Brown, 2011) and the novel Daniel, at Sea (Backlash Press, 2020).

He has recently completed the script of his first play, Dead & Wounded. Currently being developed with a director in New York.

His opinion pieces in The Times on the abuse and violence in Scotland’s elite schools have helped bring justice for survivors and contributed to one of the largest school abuse inquiries in Scottish legal history. The pieces included:

I moved private schools after teacher molested me (2023)
I was abused at my private school… now I talk about it in court (2024)
He’s a monster but justice hasn’t been done for abuse survivors (2025)
I was abused at Fettes College. They want to move on, but… (2026)

A Boy in the Kitchen

Philip’s Substack is where the memoir is finding its public shape — essay by essay, from the same table where he makes his tea and thinks about everything else.

Essay · March 2026
On Being the Lead Husky
The secrets Golding knew about British schools.
Read →
Essay · February 2026
Everything Stops for Tea
On tea, routine, and time standing still.
Read →
Essay · January 2026
Mr Rochester Comes to Lunch
As a boy, I liked meeting strangers, especially adults.
Read →
Substack
All essays
Visit A Boy in the Kitchen →

About

Philip Dundas grew up adopted, on a farm in rural Scotland with a walled garden, a difficult mother, a preoccupied father, and books. He was expelled from school at sixteen, drifted through a wilderness of drugs, bad luck and borrowed talent, and came out the other side with a ferocious appetite for life and a talent for starting over.

He read English at Oxford and took an MPhil by research at Glasgow. He spent six years as Senior Producer at the BBC, leading the Digital Curriculum team. Before that he had worked the music business — press agent to some brilliantly talented artists — until that life ran its course. After the BBC he co-founded PipsDish, a restaurant and community food enterprise in London that fed thousands over five years, and took him into a youth offenders’ prison in Belfast to cook.

His food blog, launched in 2007, was nominated for a Guild of Food Writers Award. Cooking Without Recipes was published by Little Brown in 2011. His novel Daniel, at Sea was published by Backlash Press in 2020. He has recently completed the script of his first play, Dead & Wounded, currently being developed with a director in New York. He has written on lifestyle and culture for a range of newspapers.

When a BBC programme in 2022 exposed decades of sexual abuse at his Edinburgh school, he came forward, gave evidence at the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry, and wrote about it in The Times. He helped bring criminal charges against teachers who had assumed, correctly until then, that silence would hold.

He is now writing Clype.

Daniel, at Sea, published in 2020 and subsequently revised page by page in close collaboration with a Sunday Times bestselling author, remains available for representation.

Contact

philip@philipdundas.com