George Mackay Brown

Set in the Orkneys on the fictitious island of Norday, a young poet daydreams the history of the island and its people. He travels back in time to Viking adventures at the court of the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople. Part of the 1995 Scottish Book Fortnight promotion.

Beside the Ocean of Time

Brian Murray

George Mackay Brown is recognised as one of Scotland's greatest twentieth-century lyric poets. His work is integral to the flowering of Scottish literature during the last fifty years. Admired by many fellow poets, including Seamus Heaney and Douglas Dunn, his poems are deeply individual and unmistakable in their setting: 'the small green world' of the Orkney Islands where he lived for most of his life, with its elemental forces of sea and sky and Norse and Icelandic ancestry, is brought vividly and memorably to life. Here, his rich and resonant poetry is collected in one volume, making available again many poems that are otherwise out of print.

The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown

Wellington Square has been developed to help children who have a reading age of around two years behind their chronological age, and will be particularly effective with children who are still having difficulty reading books written for 5-6 year olds. Each level comprises a set of six main reading books, ranging from wordless picture books at Level 1 to 32-page story books with some full-page text at level 5.

Poems

The Wreck of the Archangel

Poems describe life on a remote island off the coast of northern Scotland and discuss the seasons, rural life, and religious themes

Selected Poems, 1954-1992

In this collection of stories, predominated by winter and its festivals, George Mackay Brown re-establishes the tradition of ancient, hearthside story-telling.

Winter Tales

Andrina

In his fourth novel, George Mackay Brown takes us to an Orkney torn between its Viking past and its Christian future. Set in the early 11th Century, it tells the story of Ranald Sigmundson, who turns his back on a successful life of political intrigues and battles to design a ship to take him on a journey even greater than the first great voyage of his life, the one to Vinland.

Vinland

The author's beloved Orkney is brought vividly to life in this classic collection, peopled with crofters, fishermen, ferrymen and tinkers. History plays a part too, for Norse and Scottish legend are revived in tales of witch trials, priest hunts and Viking raids, all endowed with the stark beauty of George Mackay Brown's masterful storytelling.

A Calendar of Love

First published in 1973 by the Hogarth Press, Magnus is George Mackay Brown's tour de force - his most poetic and innovative book. He links the twelfth-century story of the saintly Earl Magnus of Orkney's brutal murder at the hands of his cousin Hakon Paulson, to that of the philosopher Dietrich Bonhoeffer, murdered by the Nazis during World War II. A unique exploration of the eternal questions of guilt, goodness and personal sacrifice.

Magnus

The Year of the Whale

Norman MacCaig

Iain Crichton Smith

Iain Crichton Smith, Norman MacCaig, George Mackay Brown

George Mackay-Brown

In this novel set on the fictitious island of Norday in the Orkneys, George Mackay Brown beckons us into the imaginary world of the young Thorfinn Ragnarson, the son of a crofter. In his day-dreams he relives the history of this island people, travelling back in time to join Viking adventurers at the court of the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople, then accompanying a Falstaffian knight to the battle of Bannockburn. Thorfinn wakes to the twentieth century and a community whose way of life, steeped in legend and tradition, has remained unchanged for centuries. But as the boy grows up - and falls in love with a vivacious and mysterious stranger - the transforming effect of modern civilization brings momentous and irreversible changes to the island. During the Second World War Thorfinn finds himself in a German prisoner-of-war camp, and it is here that he discovers his gifts as a writer. Long afterwards he returns, now a successful novelist, to a deserted and battle-scarred island. Searching for the peace and freedom of mind he had in abundance as a child, he finds instead something he didn't even know he was looking for. George Mackay Brown intertwines myth and reality to create a novel of deceptive simplicity. The story of Thorfinn and the island of Norday is a universal and profound one, rooted in the timeless landscape of the Orkneys, the inspiration of all his writing.

In this, the first new selection of George Mackay Brown’s poetry for over 25 years, Kathleen Jamie explores the multi-faceted world of the poet’s Orkney, his lifelong home and inspiration. George Mackay Brown’s concerns were the ancestral world, the communalities of work, the fables and religious stories which he saw as underpinning mortal lives. Brown believed from the outset that poets had a social role and his true task was to fulfil that role. Art was sprung from the community, and his role as poet to know that community, to sing its stories.

Selected Poems

Carve the Runes

Under Brinkie's Brae

Letters from Hamnavoe

Richard Demarco Gallery (Edinburgh)

Bärbel Reuter

Lanntair Gallery (Stornoway)

Portraits from the Western Edge

Ulrike Kanne, Erik Hoffmann

A Spell for Green Corn

The second collection of stories published by George Mackay Brown, this volume includes 12 stories arising from both ancient and modern life on the island of Orkney.

A Time to Keep

George Mackay Brown wrote this memoir in the years before his death in 1996, but he did not want it published while he lived. Here we see the author's simple, bardic honesty turned on himself. In particular, he looks at Orkney, where he was born the youngest child in a poor family, and which he rarely left.

For the Islands I Sing

In this new Selected Poems, Kathleen Jamie explores the multi-faceted world of George Mackay Brown's Orkney, the poet's lifelong home and inspiration. George Mackay Brown's concerns were the ancestral world, the communalities of work, the fables and religious stories which he saw as underpinning mortal lives. Brown believed from the outset that poets had a social role and his true task was to fulfil that role. This is not the attitude of a shrinking violet, tentatively exploring his 'voice'. Art was sprung from the community, and his role as poet to know that community, to sing its stories. But there was also room for introspection; the poet's task was simultaneously to 'interrogate silence'.

George Mackay Brown

About

Books

Join the club