Between 1943 and 1946 she served in the Royal Army Medical Corps, where she was stationed variously in India, Sri Lanka and Malaya.

[4] During this period she was close to, though not a member of, the Edinburgh-based Rose Street Poets, whose ranks included Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley Maclean and Norman MacCaig.

In 2012 academic Sarah Neely edited Margaret Tait Poems, Stories and Writings with a foreword by Ali Smith.

[9] Fellow Orcadian writer George MacKay Brown wrote that Tait's film Place of Work "calls to mind T. S. Eliot's poem Burnt Norton: Garden and house, a small enclave in time where gracious and lovely and stirring things have happened—love and birth and death.

Centenary exhibitions devoted to Tait's work were held at the GoMA Glasgow and The Pier Arts Centre in Orkney.

Over the next three years it was presented at over 30 screenings, including Watershed Bristol, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scratch Projections Paris, Dartington Arts, Chapter Cardiff, Cinematexas Austin, Museum of Modern Art New York,[21] Mumbai International Film Festival, Kino Arsenal Berlin,[22] National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales, Harvard Film Archive,[23] and Greek Film Archive Athens.

Wells acknowledged Tait's influence on the film,[29] particularly that of Blue Black Permanent,[30] which also centres around childhood memories of a now-absent parent as experienced in the present.

Tait's collection Poems, Stories and Writings is one of the books the character Calum (played by Paul Mescal) takes along on a Turkish summer holiday in the film.