From the early 1960s to the late 1980s, George Mackay Brown either wrote new Christmas poems which were printed on Christmas cards sent by his close friends, or, as the years went on, he designed his own cards, commissioning art from friends and family and again including original verse compositions. This book reproduces all the known cards, the majority of which were found in the possession of his great niece living in Stromness, George's home town throughout most of his life. They are a complete delight and will be a must for all of Mackay Brown's numerous and devoted followers. But they also open a door into this remarkable man's life which will have an appeal to an audience far beyond the shores of Orkney at Christmas time. 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.