William A Allan
Author • Historian • Researcher
Historical fiction and narrative history shaped by family, place, migration and the lives of ordinary people caught in extraordinary change.
William A. Allan writes from the meeting point of family history and the wider historical record. Rooted particularly in the Isle of Mull, his work explores clearance, migration, land, belonging and the choices ordinary people faced when the world around them changed.
About William
HISTORY BECAME PERSONAL
William A. Allan is an author, historian and researcher whose work grew out of a fascination with family history and the places that shaped it. His family’s roots lie particularly on the Isle of Mull, where generations of MacGillivrays lived through the changes that transformed Highland life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and live there to this day.
His professional background as a pharmaceutical chemist fostered a strong respect for evidence, detail and careful research. That discipline now underpins his historical work, combining archival records, genealogy, maps, migration records and field research with the craft of storytelling.
William’s writing focuses on ordinary people living through major historical change — clearance, migration, settlement and the difficult questions of land, belonging and memory. His aim is not simply to reconstruct what happened, but to understand what those events may have meant to the people who experienced them.
The records tell us what happened. Story helps us imagine what it meant.
THE BOOKS
Stories shaped by history
Historical fiction rooted in family, place and the human consequences of change.
Echoes of the Clearances
Love, loss and survival in the Highlands.
Set on the Isle of Mull during the Highland Clearances, Echoes of the Clearances follows one family as land, tradition and belonging are tested by forces beyond their control.
AVAILABLE NOW
There is a FREE Reader Guide that accompanies these novels. You can download your copy here
Dispossessed
From Mull to the plains of Victoria.
Following Margaret and Martin McGilvray from dispossession in Scotland to a new life in colonial Victoria, Dispossessed explores migration, resilience and the difficult question of what it means to belong.
PUBLISHING NOVEMBER 30 2026
RESEARCH & HISTORY
History begins with evidence.
William’s historical work begins with the surviving record — family papers, census returns, maps, estate records, migration documents, newspapers and the physical landscapes in which events took place.
Genealogy provides the framework, but understanding the world around the names and dates is equally important. Field research on Mull and in Australia helps connect documentary evidence with the places where families lived, worked, travelled and made difficult choices.
The aim is not to make the past fit a story, but to build the story around what can be known — and to be clear about where historical evidence ends and imagination begins.
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Start with what the evidence tells you. Imagine only what the evidence leaves open.