George Mackay Brown spent almost all his life in Stromness, yet his writing reached well beyond Orkney. Poems, stories, novels and plays draw on the islands’ weather, work, history and beliefs, moving between ordinary experience and legend. His first poetry collection, The Storm, appeared in 1954. By the late 1960s his poetry was known internationally. Brown’s achievement was to make the particular places and stories of Orkney a durable subject for Scottish literature, and to use them to consider time, faith and change.
Stromness and the making of a writer
Brown was born in Stromness on 17 October 1921, the youngest of six children. His father, John, was a tailor and postman. His mother, Mhairi Mackay, had grown up near Strathy in Sutherland and spoke the Reay Country dialect of Scottish Gaelic. Apart from periods of study on mainland Scotland, Brown lived in Stromness throughout his life. His youth was marked by poverty and tuberculosis. Ill health prevented him from entering the army during the Second World War and restricted the working life he could lead.
In 1944 he began writing about Stromness news for the Orkney Herald. His weekly “Island Diary”, published from 1945 to 1956 under the name “Islandman”, gave him a regular way to observe and record local life. The poet Francis Scarfe, who was billeted in the Brown family home for more than a year from April 1944, encouraged him to write poetry. Ernest Marwick and Robert Rendall also helped him develop as a writer.
Brown attended Newbattle Abbey College as a mature student in the 1951–52 session, when the poet Edwin Muir was warden. Recurrent tuberculosis interrupted his return the following year. His first collection, The Storm, was published by the Orkney Press in 1954. Only 300 copies were printed, and they sold out within a fortnight. Muir wrote the foreword. Brown later studied English literature at the University of Edinburgh. His next collection, Loaves and Fishes, appeared from the Hogarth Press in 1959.
Writing from the islands
Orkney was both Brown’s immediate subject and a way into larger questions. He wrote about island landscapes and communities, but also drew on Norse history and legend. The Icelandic Orkneyinga Saga informed Magnus, his novel about Magnus Erlendsson, Earl of Orkney. Seamus Heaney described Brown’s writing as passing everything “through the eye of the needle of Orkney”. The phrase captures the focus of a writer who made a particular home the measure through which he viewed a wider world.
He returned to that home in several forms. An Orkney Tapestry (1969) combines essays on Orkney with imaginative pieces and illustrations by Sylvia Wishart. His short-story collections included A Calendar of Love (1967) and A Time to Keep (1969). Fishermen with Ploughs (1971) brought together a cycle of poems about Rackwick. Brown also wrote a weekly column for The Orcadian from 1971 until the end of his life; a selection appeared as Letter from Hamnavoe in 1975.
Brown’s first novel, Greenvoe (1972), centres on an imagined Orkney community threatened by a mysterious project called Operation Black Star. Its publication coincided with the beginning of oil exploration in the Orkney area, and the novel seemed prophetic to some readers. The celebrity that followed was a trial for Brown. His next novel, Magnus (1973), turned to the story of the Orkney earl and explored sanctity and sacrifice. It also brought the subject into the twentieth century through an account of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s death. The composer Peter Maxwell Davies later used the novel as the basis for his opera The Martyrdom of St Magnus.
Recognition, later writing and remembrance
Brown received an OBE in the 1974 New Year Honours. His writing continued through periods of depression and serious ill health. Later novels included Time in a Red Coat (1984), Vinland (1992) and Beside the Ocean of Time (1994). The last follows more than 800 years of Orkney history through the dreams of a schoolboy. It won the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award for 1994 and was listed for the Booker Prize for Fiction. The Golden Bird: Two Orkney Stories won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Brown was diagnosed with bowel cancer and underwent two major operations in 1990. In his final years he remained in his Stromness home, cared for by friends, and continued to write. The poems of Following a Lark were delivered there on 13 April 1996, the day he died after a short illness. He was buried three days later at Kirkwall’s St Magnus Cathedral. Maxwell Davies played “Farewell to Stromness” at the service. Brown’s autobiography, For the Islands I Sing, was published after his death, in 1997.
His work has continued to be marked and preserved in Scotland. A plaque bearing a quotation from his poem “Hamnavoe” was unveiled at Edinburgh’s Writers’ Museum in 2005. The centenary of his birth in 2021 brought events in Orkney and elsewhere in Scotland, including an exhibition at the Orkney Museum and a digital collection created by the University of the Highlands and Islands. Much of his personal and literary archive, including diaries and correspondence, is held by the National Library of Scotland. Collected Poems, published in 2005, brought together poetry written across several decades.
Conclusion
Brown’s writing preserves a close attention to Orkney without reducing the islands to a picturesque setting. The same landscape can hold a working community, a remembered past and a story shaped by myth or faith. Across poems, fiction and essays, he gave space to the ordinary details of island life while returning to larger concerns: how communities change, how people understand belief, and how the past continues to inhabit the present.
His career also connected literary forms and artists. Brown’s novel Magnus became a source for Maxwell Davies’s opera, while the local newspaper columns kept him in regular contact with the place he wrote about. Awards for his later books and the continuing care of his archive offer further evidence of the breadth and persistence of his work. The contrast between his rooted life in Stromness and the reach of his writing is not a contradiction; it is central to his achievement. Orkney remained his subject, but it did not confine the questions his work could ask.
Why George Mackay Brown deserves a place in British Legacy
George Mackay Brown deserves a place in British Legacy because he made the history and daily life of Orkney an enduring part of Scottish writing. That contribution is visible across a substantial body of work: the poems of The Storm and Fishermen with Ploughs, the stories of A Time to Keep, and novels such as Greenvoe and Magnus. He wrote from close knowledge of a particular island community, drawing on its landscape and Norse past without treating it as a world apart. His books connect local experience with questions of faith, sacrifice, time and change, giving readers a way to encounter Orkney through its people and stories.
The benefits of that achievement extend beyond the books themselves. Maxwell Davies’s opera based on Magnus shows how Brown’s writing could inspire work in another art form. His poems and prose remain available in collected editions, while the archive held by the National Library of Scotland preserves diaries and correspondence for readers and researchers. The Writers’ Museum plaque and the centenary events in Orkney and elsewhere in Scotland keep his work in public view. These are specific forms of literary legacy: a body of writing that continues to be read, studied and adapted, and a lasting record of the islands that shaped it. Brown’s example demonstrates how a writer’s sustained attention to one home can enlarge, rather than narrow, the cultural record of Scotland and Britain.
Sources
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.