George Mackay Brown

(born 17 October 1921 - died April 1996) - Stromness, Orkney

George MacKay Brown
© Chick Chalmers. Licensor www.scran.ac.uk

George Mackay Brown, who died in 1996, was one of Scotland's finest and most prolific novelists. He was born in Stromness, Orkney, in 1921, and lived there for most of his life, drawing inspiration from its past, people, and landscapes, to create his spare, beautifully written fiction and poetry. His father was a postman and tailor; his mother was a native Gaelic speaker from Sutherland.

Poor health in his teens and twenties meant he did not stray far from Orkney apart from a formative period at Newbattle College near Edinburgh followed by a degree at Edinburgh University. After taking his degree, he returned to Orkney and began to have his work published in 1954.

Mackay Brown's friendship with the composer, Peter Maxwell Davies, was a fruitful one. Together, they collaborated on over 30 pieces of work: song cycles, operas, and music for plays celebrating Orkney’s distinctive cultural heritage. One of Mackay Brown’s last novels, Beside the Ocean of Time, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994. His autobiography, For the Islands I Sing, was published shortly after his death.

Key Titles

  • Cover scan of Beside The Ocean Of Time
    Beside The Ocean Of Time
    Shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize, 'Beside the Ocean of Time' mixes myth and reality in an Orkney setting.
  • Cover scan of The Collected Poems Of George Mackay Brown
    The Collected Poems Of George Mackay Brown
    George Mackay Brown is recognised as one of Scotland's greatest 20th century lyric poets. This collected edition comprises a treasure trove of gems, bringing together his much-loved poems.
  • Cover scan of For The Islands I Sing
    For The Islands I Sing: An Autobiography
    George Mackay died in 1996. He wrote this memoir in the years before his death, but did not want it published while he was still alive. Here his simple, bardic honesty is turned upon himself.
  • Cover scan of Greenvoe
    Greenvoe
    Greenvoe, the community on the Orkney Island of Hellya, has existed unchanged for generations. George Mackay Brown has recreated a week in its life, mixing history with personality in a sparkling mixture of prose and poetry.
  • Cover scan of Hawkfall And Other Stories
    Hawkfall And Other Stories
    This collection of stories demonstrates the full range of George Mackay Brown's literary talent. All of these sharply-etched fables deal with his perennial themes - love, violence, death and rebirth - and are set in an Orcadian world that spans myth and reality, past and present.
  • Cover scan of The Island Of The Women And Other Stories
    The Island Of The Women
    In these six stories Brown leads us back along the sweep of Orkney's past and beyond to the remoteness of fable. As always he reveals the timelessness of the lived moment and he finds the constants of all life in the harvest of the sea and land.
  • Cover scan of Letters From Hamnavoe
    Letters From Hamnavoe
    For many years George Mackay Brown wrote a weekly column in The Orcadian. Letters from Hamnavoe is the first of three volumes that comprise selections from the newspaper reflecting the author's musings on various interesting subjects.
  • Cover scan of Magnus
    Magnus
    George Mackay Brown turns the story of the saintly Earl Magnus of Orkney into a much wider and more transfiguring metaphor for goodness within a society that is corrupt and debased. Magnus is one of the writer's most important novels.
  • Cover scan of A Time To Keep And Other Stories
    A Time To Keep
    Set against the harsh background of Orkney, this collection of stories tells of fishermen, crofters, farmers and tinkers and how they live out their lives. The author succeeds in writing in a style that takes the reader into the realm of the mystical.
  • Cover scan of Under Brinkie's Brae
    Under Brinkie's Brae
    For many years George Mackay Brown wrote a weekly column in 'The Orcadian', and this book is the second of three selections from it which have been collected into books. It contains more of his independent-minded musings on those subjects that interested him.

Bibliography

Books about George Mackay Brown

  • BDS Thumbnail Image
    George Mackay Brown's Greenvoe Alan MacGillivray; Association for Scottish Literary Studies
    The 'Scotnotes' series is a collection of study guides on major Scottish writers and literary texts. This volume looks at George Mackay Brown's 'Greenvoe'.
  • Cover scan of George Mackay Brown
    The Life Of George Mackay Brown: The Life Maggie Fergusson
    George Mackay Brown was one of Scotland's greatest 20th century writers, but in person a bundle of paradoxes. Maggie Fergusson interviewed him several times and is the only biographer to whom he gave his blessing. Through his letters and through conversations with his acquaintance, she discovers that his life was vivid and surprising.
  • BDS Thumbnail Image
    'Keeping The Sources Pure': The Making Of George Mackay Brown Sabine Schmid
    Sabine Schmid assesses the literary stature of George Mackay Brown by contextualising his prose and his poetry within 20th century British and European literary practices and traditions of thought.