George MacKay Brown was born in Stromness in the Orkney Islands in 1921. He studied at Newbattle Abbey under Edwin Muir and read English at Edinburgh University. He has published many books including plays, poems, novels and collections of short stories. Edwin Muir described his work as possessing ‘a strangeness and magic rare anywhere in literature today’. George Mackay Brown has seldom left Orkney since he completed his academic studies, and the imagery and history of the islands has been the inspiration for all his work. His novel Beside the Ocean of Time was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize.