Christopher Murray Grieve (11 August 1892 – 9 September 1978), best known by his pen name Hugh MacDiarmid (/məkˈdɜːrmɪd/ mək-DUR-mid, Scots: [ˈhju məkˈdjɑrmɪd]), was a Scottish poet, journalist, essayist and political figure.

He began his writing career as a journalist in Wales,[1][2][3] contributing to the socialist newspaper The Merthyr Pioneer run by Labour party founder Keir Hardie[2] before joining the Royal Army Medical Corps at the outbreak of the First World War.

[4] Moving to the Shetland island of Whalsay in 1933 with his son Michael and second wife, Valda Trevlyn, MacDiarmid continued to write essays and poetry despite being cut off from mainland cultural developments for much of the 1930s.

[5] At different times throughout his life, MacDiarmid was a supporter of Fascism,[6][7] Stalinism, and Scottish nationalism, views that routinely put him at acrimonious odds with his contemporaries.

Fellow poet Edwin Morgan said of him: "Eccentric and often maddening genius he may be, but MacDiarmid has produced many works which, in the only test possible, go on haunting the mind and memory and casting Coleridgean seeds of insight and surprise.

[9] His father was a postman; his family lived above the town library, giving MacDiarmid access to books from an early age.

Grieve attended Langholm Academy and, from 1908, Broughton Junior Student Centre in Edinburgh, where he studied under George Ogilvie who introduced him to the magazine The New Age.

He left the school on 27 January 1911, following the theft of some books and postage stamps; his father died eight days later, on 3 February 1911.

At about this time MacDiarmid turned to Scots for a series of books, culminating in what is probably his best known work, the book-length A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle.

"The often tormented genius wrote much of his finest poetry (including 'On a Raised Beach') and, via the Whalsay post office, conducted furious correspondence with the leading writers and thinkers of his generation.

[20] In 1949, George Orwell included MacDiarmid in a list he wrote for the Information Research Department of fellow left-wing writers whom he suspected of sympathies for the Soviet Union or direct links with the NKVD.

He stood against the Conservative Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home in Kinross and Western Perthshire at the 1964 election, taking only 127 votes.

In a letter sent from Whalsay in April 1941, he wrote: "On balance I regard the Axis powers, tho' more violently evil for the time being, less dangerous than our own government in the long run and indistinguishable in purpose.

"[6] A year earlier, in June 1940, he wrote: "Although the Germans are appalling enough, they cannot win, but the British and French bourgeoisie can and they are a far greater enemy.

Despite Hugh MacDiarmid weaponizing the accusation of Fascism against South African poet Roy Campbell over their differing opinions of the Spanish Civil War and accordingly set off a decades-long and very acrimonious public feud,[21] as Marc Horne has commented in the Daily Telegraph: "MacDiarmid flirted with fascism in his early thirties, when he believed it was a doctrine of the left.

As a result, many of the poems in Stony Limits (1934) and later volumes are a kind of found poetry reusing text from a range of sources.

In his critical work Lives of the Poets, Michael Schmidt notes that Hugh MacDiarmid 'had redrawn the map of Scottish poetry and affected the whole configuration of English literature'.

[27] MacDiarmid wrote a number of non-fiction prose works, including Scottish Eccentrics and his autobiography Lucky Poet.

The town is home to a monument in his honour made of cast iron which takes the form of a large open book depicting images from his writings.