Ian Hamilton Finlay CBE (28 October 1925 – 27 March 2006) was a Scottish poet, writer, artist and gardener.

At the age of 13, with the outbreak of the Second World War, he was evacuated to family in the countryside (firstly to Gartmore and then to Kirkudbright).

At the end of the war, Finlay worked as a shepherd, before beginning to write short stories and poems, while living on Rousay, in Orkney.

[11] Repetition, imitation and tradition lay at the heart of Hamilton's poetry,[12] and exploring "the juxtaposition of apparently opposite ideas".

[13] Later, Finlay began to compose poems to be inscribed into stone, incorporating these sculptures into the natural environment.

[16] Second and third were the Glasgow School of Art by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and The Skating Minister by Henry Raeburn.

Finlay's work is notable for a number of recurring themes: a penchant for classical writers (especially Virgil); a concern with fishing and the sea; an interest in the French Revolution; and a continual revisiting of World War II and the memento mori Latin phrase Et in Arcadia ego.

[23] In the 1982 exhibition The Third Reich Revisited, Nazi iconography featured on architectural drawings by Ian Appleton, with captions by Finlay which could be read as a sardonic critique of Scotland's arts establishment.

Finlay sued a Paris magazine which had made such accusations, and was awarded nominal damages of one franc.

[5] Finlay respected the expertise of sandblasters, engravers and printers he worked with,[34] having approximately one hundred collaborators including Patrick Caulfield, Richard Demarco, Malcolm Fraser, Christopher Hall, Margot Sandeman.