Book description
George Mackay Brown was one of Scotland's greatest twentieth-century
writers, but in person a bundle of paradoxes. He had a wide
international reputation, but hardly left his native Orkney. A prolific
poet, admired by such fellow poets as Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and
Charles Causley, and hailed by the composer Peter Maxwell Davies as 'the
most positive and benign influence ever on my own efforts at creation',
he was also an accomplished novelist (shortlisted for the 1994 Booker
Prize for Beside the Ocean of Time) and a master of the short story.
When he died in 1996, he left behind an autobiography as deft as it is
ultimately uninformative. 'The lives of artists are as boring and also
as uniquely fascinating as any or every other life,' he claimed. Never a
recluse, he appeared open to his friends, but probably revealed more of
himself in his voluminous correspondence with strangers. He never
married - indeed he once wrote, 'I have never been in love in my life.'
But some of his most poignant letters and poems were written to Stella
Cartwright, 'the Muse of Rose Street', the gifted but tragic figure to
whom he was once engaged and with whom he kept in touch until the end of
her short life. Maggie Fergusson interviewed George Mackay Brown several
times and is the only biographer to whom he, a reluctant subject, gave
his blessing. Through his letters and through conversations with his
wide acquaintance, she discovers that this particular artist's life was
not only fascinating but vivid, courageous and surprising. 'This
subtle, sensitive, beautifully-written biography is a superb example of
an author wholly in tune with her subject' Maggie Fergusson has
written for newspapers and magazines including
The Times
, the Daily Telegraph
and Sunday Telegraph
, Harpers & Queen
and the Independent
magazine, and is Secretary of the Royal Society of Literature. She is
married with two daughters and lives in London.
