Born on the Orkney island of Wyre in 1887, Edwin Muir spent his early years in the idyllic setting of his father's farm, 'The Bu', until increasing farm rents forced the family to move, first to Orkney's mainland and then, in 1901, to Glasgow. This move from the peaceful, agricultural setting of Orkney to industrialised Glasgow was extremely traumatic for Muir, and he would later describe it as a descent from the innocence of a rural Eden into Hell. Conditions in Glasgow were hard and, within a few years of their arrival, two of his brothers and both his parents were dead. The remaining siblings chose to go their separate ways and Muir found himself adrift in a large city with little education or prospects.

From this background, Muir worked in a number of menial jobs and became increasingly interested in left-wing politics, as did many writers of the early-twentieth-century in Scotland. In 1916 he began contributing poetry to a magazine called New Age under the pseudonym 'Edward Moore', and his first book, a volume of short pithy essays on society, politics and the arts, entitled We Moderns, was published in 1918.

1918 was also the year in which he met his future wife, Willa Anderson, who, as Willa Muir, would later become well-known as a novelist. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Muirs travelled extensively throughout Europe, living in Prague, Dresden, Vienna, Salzburg and Rome. This lifestyle of constant travel can be seen, in part, to reflect a sense of displacement or rootlessness which originated in Muir's early departure from Orkney, and which stayed with him throughout his life.

Muir, in these years, became increasingly interested by developments in modernist European literature and, with Willa, translated more than forty novels from German, including those of Franz Kafka. He was also gaining a reputation as a literary critic and poet, although his first collection, First Poems, was not published until 1925 when he was thirty-eight.

Today, he is identified as one of the central figures of the modern Scottish literary Renaissance, both for his poetry and for his book Scott and Scotland (1936), in which he argued controversially that Scottish literature would have a better chance of international recognition if it were to be written in English, a line that brought him into conflict with Hugh MacDiarmid, the major literary force of the period.

In 1946 he was appointed Director of the British Council and the couple returned to live in Prague, and then Rome. In 1950 he became warden of Newbattle Abbey College, an adult education centre in Midlothian where he encouraged the early writing of George Mackay Brown, a fellow Orcadian. Although he only returned to Orkney for holidays, the islands remained a central reference-point throughout his life, a fact which was detailed in his autobiography, initially entitled The Story and the Fable (1940) but later re-worked as An Autobiography (1954).

In 1955 Muir was made the Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University in the USA, before returning to England, where he died at Cambridge in 1959. He is buried nearby in the village of Swaffham Prior.