George Mackay Brown: the poet who made Orkney his subject

George Mackay Brown spent almost all his life in Stromness, yet his writing travelled far beyond Orkney. In poems, stories, novels and newspaper columns, he returned to the islands’ people, landscapes and history, making local experience the substance of a distinctive literary world. His work ranged from the concise images of his verse to the long historical sweep of Beside the Ocean of Time.

A life rooted in Stromness

Brown was born in Stromness, Orkney, on 17 October 1921, the youngest of six children. His parents were John Brown, a tailor and postman, and Mhairi Mackay, who had grown up speaking the Reay Country dialect of Scottish Gaelic. Except for periods of study on the Scottish mainland, Brown lived in Stromness throughout his life. The circumstances of his youth were difficult: his father’s illness restricted his work, the family lived in poverty, and Brown contracted tuberculosis.

Ill health prevented him from entering the army at the start of the Second World War and later limited his ability to work. In 1944, he began writing for The Orkney Herald, covering news from Stromness. He became a prolific journalist, and his weekly “Island Diary” ran in the paper from 1945 to 1956, written under the name “Islandman”. The column gave him a regular form through which to observe the community around him. From 1971 until the end of his life, he also wrote a weekly column for The Orcadian.

Brown’s early encouragement came from writers who recognised his developing talent. Francis Scarfe, a poet billeted at the family home, encouraged him to write poetry. He later valued the criticism of Ernest Marwick and Robert Rendall. In 1951–52, Brown attended Newbattle Abbey College as a mature student, where the poet Edwin Muir was warden. His return for the next session was interrupted by recurrent tuberculosis. He subsequently studied English literature at the University of Edinburgh.

Finding a voice in poetry

Brown’s first collection, The Storm, appeared from the Orkney Press in 1954. Muir wrote its foreword, and the small print run sold out within a fortnight. Loaves and Fishes, his second collection, followed in 1959. After a period of unemployment and rejection, Brown’s collection The Year of the Whale was accepted in 1964. New commissions helped him support himself through writing, while a Scottish Arts Council bursary supported work on the short-story collection A Calendar of Love, published in 1967.

Poetry remained central to his work, but Brown did not confine himself to it. He wrote short stories, drama, children’s books, essays and novels. His writing often draws on the history and traditions of Orkney, including the Icelandic Orkneyinga Saga. Seamus Heaney described Brown’s way of transforming life as “passing everything through the eye of the needle of Orkney”. In practice, that meant a local setting could carry stories and concerns extending well beyond the islands.

His 1969 collection An Orkney Tapestry combined essays on Orkney with imaginative pieces and illustrations by Sylvia Wishart. The same year, his short-story collection A Time to Keep received a positive welcome. Brown also completed a cycle of poems about Rackwick, published in 1971 as Fishermen with Ploughs. The Rackwick landscape and its communities would remain part of his imaginative map.

Novels, history and recognition

Brown’s first novel, Greenvoe, was published in 1972. It centres on an imagined Orkney community threatened by an obscure scheme called “Operation Black Star”. The novel appeared as oil exploration was beginning in the Orkney area, a coincidence that brought Brown public attention he found difficult. In Magnus (1973), he turned to the story of Magnus Erlendsson, Earl of Orkney, whose life is recounted in the Orkneyinga Saga. Brown connected the medieval theme of sacrifice with the twentieth century through an account of the death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Peter Maxwell Davies later drew on the novel for his opera The Martyrdom of St Magnus.

Brown received an OBE in the 1974 New Year Honours. His later fiction continued to move between Orkney’s history and the lives of its inhabitants. The Golden Bird: Two Orkney Stories won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Vinland, published in 1992, follows a fictional character from the Viking era. His final novel, Beside the Ocean of Time (1994), ranges across more than 800 years of Orkney history through the dreams of a schoolboy. It was named Scottish Book of the Year by the Saltire Society and shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Brown continued writing in his final years, preparing the poems that became Following a Lark. He died in Stromness on 13 April 1996, after a short illness. The first copies of the book arrived at his home on the day of his death. He was buried in Kirkwall, with the service held at St Magnus Cathedral. Peter Maxwell Davies played “Farewell to Stromness”. Brown’s gravestone bears the closing lines of his poem “A work for poets”: “Carve the runes / Then be content with silence.”

A lasting presence in Scottish letters

Brown’s writing has continued to be marked and collected after his death. His autobiography, For the Islands I Sing, appeared in 1997. In 2005, a memorial plaque was unveiled at the Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh, bearing lines from “Hamnavoe”. The National Library of Scotland holds much of his personal and literary archive, including diaries and correspondence. The centenary of his birth in 2021 brought exhibitions and other events in Orkney and Scotland, including an Orkney Museum exhibition titled Beside the Ocean of Time.

His work is often characterised by lean description and carefully chosen detail. Orkney provided Brown with more than scenery: its history, work, stories and changing communities shaped the subjects and forms of his writing. That grounding is apparent across genres, from poems and short stories to novels that look at the islands through different periods of time.

Why George Mackay Brown deserves a place in British Legacy

George Mackay Brown deserves a place in British Legacy because he made a sustained literary achievement out of a particular Scottish place without reducing it to a picturesque backdrop. In poems, journalism and fiction, Stromness and the wider Orkney community supplied people, language, work and history. His writing drew on local stories and the Orkneyinga Saga, while novels such as Magnus brought the islands’ past into conversation with twentieth-century concerns. Beside the Ocean of Time similarly uses an Orkney schoolboy’s dreams to range across centuries. These works offer readers a way to encounter Scottish island life through its own people and traditions, rather than as a distant setting.

His legacy also rests on the breadth and endurance of his work. Brown wrote poetry, short stories, plays, children’s books, essays, columns and novels, maintaining a working life shaped by recurring illness and periods of depression. His books reached readers beyond Orkney: The Golden Bird won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and Beside the Ocean of Time received the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The archive held by the National Library of Scotland, the Edinburgh memorial and the centenary events in Orkney keep that work available to readers and writers. Brown’s place in British literary heritage is specific and earned: he gave the history and everyday life of Orkney a lasting presence in Scottish writing.

Sources

George Mackay Brown — Wikipedia revision 1373256441

Adapted in part from George Mackay Brown by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.