[1] His work to promote Scottish poets and artists included Hugh MacDiarmid and Ian Hamilton Finlay, among others.
He was educated at West Coats Primary School in Cambuslang, then at Rutherglen Academy, but left at 15 to become an office boy and apprentice printer in Glasgow and Kirkcaldy, before studying at Edinburgh College of Art.
After a brief spell as an editor in Glasgow with Robert Gibson & Sons Ltd, educational publishers, at what was to become Preston Polytechnic, he was appointed Professor of Visual Communication at what would be Nottingham Trent University.
They included poetry, critical and historical studies, Akros magazine (51 issues) and Zed 2 0 (19 numbers), and fiction by Robert McLellan, John Herdman and others.
His aim as editor of Akros magazine was to publish modern Scottish poetry in Scots and English, cutting across the "fighting cliques" of the time.