George Mackay Brown, the poet, novelist and dramatist, spent his life living in and documenting the Orkney Isles, situated off the north coast of Scotland. He was born in Stromness on the Orkney mainland in 1921, the son of a tailor and postman. Educated at Stromness Academy, his health was impaired by a severe bout of measles at the age of 12 which weakened his lungs and would be the basis for recurring respiratory problems throughout his life. Uncertain as to his future, he remained in education until 1940, a year which brought with it a growing reality of the war, and the unexpected death of his father. A further shock came the following year when he was diagnosed with (then incurable) Pulmonary Tuberculosis and spent six months in hospital in Kirkwall, Orkney's main town.
Around this time, Mackay Brown began writing poetry, and also prose pieces for the Orkney Herald for which he became Stromness Correspondent, reporting events such as the switching on of the electricity grid in 1947. In late 1950 Mackay Brown met Edwin Muir, a fellow Orcadian, well known as a poet and translator in the Scottish Literary Renaissance, and his wife Willa. Muir recognised Mackay Brown's talent for writing, and would become his literary tutor and mentor at Newbattle Abbey College, an adult education centre in Midlothian, which he attended in 1951-2. Recurring Tuberculosis forced Mackay Brown to spend the following year in hospital, but the interest in writing and in literature forged at Newbattle spurred him to apply to Edinburgh University, where he read English Literature, returning to do post-graduate work on Gerard Manley Hopkins.
After these years, Mackay Brown rarely left Orkney. He turned full-time to writing, with his first collection of poetry, The Storm, published in 1954. In his writing he explored the experience of life on the Orkney isles, and his work is a rich and unique celebration of the history and traditions which make up Orkney's distinct cultural identity. Together, there are several poetry collections, five novels, eight collections of short stories and two poem-plays, as well as non-fiction portraits of Orkney, an autobiography, For the Islands I Sing (1997), and published journalism.
Many of Mackay Brown's works are concerned with protecting Orkney's cultural heritage from the relentless march of progress and the loss of myth and archaic ritual in the modern world, an anxiety which was further influenced by his conversion in 1961 to Catholicism. Reflecting this, his best known work is Greenvoe, a novel published in 1972, in which the permanence of island life is threatened by 'Black Star', a mysterious nuclear development.
Mackay Brown's literary reputation grew steadily. He received an OBE in 1974 and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1977, in addition to gaining several honorary degrees. His final novel, Beside the Ocean of Time (1994) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and judged Scottish Book of the Year by the Saltire Society. Mackay Brown died in his home town of Stromness on 13th April 1996.
