George Mackay Brown

George Mackay Brown lived nearly all his life in Stromness, Orkney, whose history and people shaped his poems, stories and novels. Encouraged by the poet Edwin Muir, he published his first collection in 1954 and went on to write Greenvoe and Beside the Ocean of Time, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994. He was made an OBE in 1974 and died in 1996.