Robert Garioch was, along with William Soutar and Sidney Goodsir Smith, one of a generation of poets who continued the work begun by Hugh MacDiarmid, whose 1920s collections Sangschaw, Penny Wheep and A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle were revolutionary in using the Scots language as the medium for a modern, European style of poetry.

Robert Garioch Sutherland was born in Edinburgh in 1909. He studied English at Edinburgh University between 1927 and 1931. At this time he began to write poetry in Scots. Garioch published his first collection Seventeen Poems for 6d with the Gaelic poet Somhairle MacGill-Eain (Sorley MacLean) in 1940. This was followed by Chuckies on the Cairn (1949), Garioch's first full book of poetry. Garioch spent many years working as a schoolteacher in the London area, both before and after the Second World War. During the War, Garioch served as a signalman, and was captured and became a prisoner of war. His wartime experiences are recounted in prose in Two Men and a Blanket: Memoirs of Captivity (1975).

He returned to Edinburgh in the late 1950s and took early retirement from teaching in the mid 1960s. Thereafter Garioch worked in the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh where he held a Writer's Fellowship from 1971 until 1973. He died in the spring of 1981.