George Mackay Brown (17 October 1921 – 13 April 1996) was a Scottish poet, author and dramatist with a distinctly Orcadian character.

Brown's illness kept him from entering the army at the start of the Second World War and affected him so badly he could not live a normal working life.

He was sometimes portrayed by "Spike" (Bob Johnston), the paper's cartoonist, wearing a prominent scarf in the regular Spotlight comic strip.

Jo Grimond, the local MP, said "the scarf should be retained as permanent inter-county trophy," but Brown complained that "they hadn't even washed it".

"[14] Brown was a mature student at Newbattle Abbey College in the 1951–1952 session,[15] where the poet Edwin Muir, who had a great influence on his life as a writer, was warden.

[19] After publication of poems in a literary magazine, with the help of Muir,[20] Brown had a second volume, Loaves and Fishes, published by the Hogarth Press in 1959.

[21] During this period he met many of the Scottish poets of his time – Sydney Goodsir Smith, Norman MacCaig, Hugh MacDiarmid, Tom Scott and others – with whom he often drank in Rose Street, Edinburgh.

[23] In late 1960, Brown commenced teacher training at Moray House College of Education, but ill health prevented him remaining in Edinburgh.

[24] At this juncture he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, converting from Presbyterianism of his childhood[25][26] being baptised on 23 December and taking communion the next day.

[27] After a period of unemployment and rejection of a volume of his poetry by the Hogarth Press,[28] Brown did a postgraduate study on Gerard Manley Hopkins, although such work was not to his taste.

[31] He received a bursary from the Scottish Arts Council in December 1965[32] as he was working on the volume of short stories, A Calendar of Love, which was issued to critical acclaim in February 1967.

Subsequently, Davies, who came to live in Rackwick, based a number of his works on the poetry and prose of George Mackay Brown.

[43] Brown was now working on his first novel Greenvoe, the story of an imaginary Orkney community menaced by an undefined project called 'Operation Black Star'.

[44] The exception is Mrs Mckee, mother of the (alcoholic) minister; Brown had intended her to be a minor character but he said of her, "I grew to love her more and more as the novel unfolded".

[52] While some critics see the work as "disjointed",[52] Peter Maxwell Davies, for example, marks it as Brown's greatest achievement and used it as the basis of his opera The Martyrdom of St Magnus.

[53] Yet he maintained a stream of writing: poetry, children's stories, and a weekly column in the local newspaper, The Orcadian, which ran from 1971 to the end of his life.

[66] Brown later formed an intense, platonic attachment to Kenna Crawford, to whom he dedicated The Golden Bird: Two Orkney Stories and some poems in the volume The wreck of the Archangel.

[69] Between 1987 and 1989, Brown travelled to Nairn, including a visit to Pluscarden Abbey, to Shetland and to Oxford, making it the longest time he had left Orkney since his earlier studies in Edinburgh.

[70] Shortly afterwards, Brown was diagnosed with bowel cancer, which required two major operations in 1990 and a lengthy stay in Foresterhill Hospital, Aberdeen.

[72] Vinland, which won Brown a £1,000 award from the Scottish Arts Council,[73] traces the life of Ranald Sigmundson, a fictional character from the Viking era.

[60] It won the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award for 1994 and was listed for the Booker Prize for Fiction,[74] which caused Brown acute anxiety.

[75] During his last years Brown remained in his home, cared for by a network of friends, including Surinder Punjya[76] (later principal of the Nesbitt Centre, Hong Kong), Gunnie Moberg,[77] and Renée Simm.

[88][89] Brown's poetry and prose have been seen as characterised by "the absence of frills and decoration; the lean simplicity of description, colour, shape and action reduced to essentials, which heightens the reality of the thing observed,"[90] while "his poems became informed by a unique voice that was his alone, controlled and dispassionate, which allowed every word to play its part in the narrative scheme of the unfolding poem.