George Mackay Brown was born in Orkney in 1921. Having contracted TB in 1940, the year in which he left Stromness Academy, and of his father's death, he was not called up for military service.

He began to write for The Orkney Herald and The New Shetlander, and his first trip away from Orkney was in 1948, for a family holiday in Aberdeen. In 1951 he met Edwin Muir, who was born in Orkney but had left it as a teenager. Muir was then Warden of Newbattle Abbey College near Edinburgh, which offered those who had left school without qualifications a further chance to study.

Brown spent a year at Newbattle from October 1951. After returning to Orkney, he suffered another bout of TB. His first book, The Storm and other poems, was published in 1954 (at his own expense), with an introduction by Muir.

Brown returned to Newbattle in 1956, and then spent three years at Edinburgh University studying English, graduating in 1960, after The Hogarth Press in London (again thanks to Muir) had published Loaves and Fishes.

He returned to Orkney where in 1961 he converted to Roman Catholicism. He continued to write and publish extensively, rarely leaving Orkney. He died in 1996.

© Ken Cockburn 2002

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