George Mackay Brown was born in Stromness, Orkney, on 17 October 1921. He died there in 1996. His many awards include a Society of Authors Travel Award, 1968; SAC Literature Prize, 1969; Katherine Mansfield Menton Short Story Prize, 1971; Hon. LLD from Dundee University, 1977; OBE, 1974; James Tait Black Memorial Prize 1987 (for The Golden Bird). He was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1994 for his novel Beside the Ocean of Time. He grew up in fairly straitened circumstances as his father was unable to work through illness. Mackay Brown himself suffered from tuberculosis as a young man. In his twenties he worked as a journalist on the Orkney Herald, but at the age of 30 he left Orkney to study at Newbattle Abbey College, near Edinburgh, where he met Edwin Muir, who was Warden at the time, a meeting that had a profound influence on him. He left behind him an extraordinary body of work: novels, short stories, poetry, journalism and even two operatic collaborations with Peter Maxwell Davis. A Winter Collection gathers together some of the Winter and Christmas stories and poems that he either published separately in newspapers, included in limited edition book printings, or published in Winter Tales, which is now unavailable. His first book of poems The Storm is also published by Galileo, with an introduction by Kathleen Jamie. AUTHOR: 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. SELLING POINTS: . Much of the work here has never been published in book form . Brown’s 100th birth centenary is in 2021
