Selected Poetry

Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve) was born in 1892 at Langholm in the Scottish Borders. After training as a teacher, he worked as a journalist, before serving in France and Greece during the First World War. Returning to Scotland, he worked as a journalist, and in 1922 began to publish poems in Scots. From that point he became a key figure in the Scottish Renaissance. He became a founder-member of the Scottish National Party in 1928, and joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1934. He was expelled from both during the 1930s, although he rejoined the Communist Party in 1956. Between 1933 and 1942 he lived with his second wife in the Shetlands. In 1951 he settled with his family at Brownsbank, near Biggar, where he lived until his death in 1978. Alan Riach is a poet, teacher and critic, and the general editor of Carcanet’s Collected Works of Hugh MacDiarmid. MICHAEL GRIEVE, the son of Christopher Murray Grieve, was a journalist and editor on newspapers and a television producer and editor. He was Vice-Chairman of the Scottish National Party. Michael Grieve died in 1995.

'Riach has done Scottish literature a great service in masterminding the Carcanet edition of the works of Hugh MacDiarmid...' Times Literary Supplement