George Mackay Brown's Orkney: Writers Who Shaped the Isles

For a place with a population the size of a small town, Orkney has produced an extraordinary weight of literature — and an even more extraordinary weight of writers willing to spend their lives describing it. George Mackay Brown almost never left Stromness. Edwin Muir left at fourteen and spent the next sixty-two years writing his way back. Eric Linklater settled here in 1933 and turned the islands into the backdrop for some of the most acerbic Scottish novels of the twentieth century. Behind them stand the medieval saga writers, the Orcadian dialect poets, and a new generation of memoirists. This is a guide to the writers, the books, and the specific places in Orkney where you can still walk in their footsteps.

Eight Centuries of Orkney Writing

Orkney's literary record begins not on the islands themselves but in Iceland, around the year 1230, when an unknown scribe — probably associated with the monastery at Oddi — compiled the Orkneyinga Saga. The original twelfth-century version no longer exists; the surviving text is a thirteenth-century reworking that chronicles the Norse earls of Orkney from the late ninth century down to the murder of Earl Jon Haraldsson in 1231. It is, as the British scholars who edit it have noted, the only medieval chronicle to have Orkney as the central place of action — and it is the literary foundation on which everything else in this post is built.

George Mackay Brown (1921–1996): The Bard of Hamnavoe

No writer is more synonymous with Orkney than George Mackay Brown — usually shortened to GMB. He was born in Stromness on 17 October 1921, lived in the town his whole life, and died there on 13 April 1996. From 1968 until his death he lived at 3 Mayburn Court, a modest council flat overlooking the harbour, which is now the centre of any serious literary pilgrimage to Orkney.

Stromness — the 'Hamnavoe' of his poems and stories — gave him almost everything he wrote about. His Loaves and Fishes (1959) established his voice as a poet of fishing communities and Catholic ritual. An Orkney Tapestry (1969), commissioned by the publisher Victor Gollancz, was the prose travel-essay that put Orkney on the literary map for a generation of mainland readers. His novels Greenvoe (1972) and Magnus (1973) followed in successive years. He was awarded an OBE in the 1974 New Year Honours, and the late masterpiece Beside the Ocean of Time was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994, the same year it was judged Scottish Book of the Year by the Saltire Society. His short-story collection The Golden Bird: Two Orkney Stories (1987) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

If you read one book before visiting, make it An Orkney Tapestry. It is short, episodic, and reads like a series of love letters — to Rackwick Bay on Hoy ("Orkney’s last enchantment"), to the medieval Earls of Orkney, to fishermen at the Stromness piers, to St Magnus Cathedral. Almost every place described in it is still standing and still walkable.

Edwin Muir (1887–1959): Eden, Exile, Eternity

If GMB is the writer who never left, Edwin Muir is the writer who never stopped trying to return. He was born on 15 May 1887 at the farm of Folly in Deerness, a parish on the east Mainland. The family moved to the tiny island of Wyre, then back to Mainland, and finally — in 1901, when Edwin was fourteen — to Glasgow, after his father lost the farm. Muir spent the rest of his life writing about that exile.

His autobiography — published in 1940 as The Story and the Fable and expanded in 1954 as An Autobiography — describes the move from Wyre to Glasgow as a fall out of prelapsarian time and into industrial squalor. Read against Jungian theory and his post-war horror at Europe’s collapse, the imagery becomes almost unbearable. He was awarded a CBE in the 1953 Coronation Honours.

His most anthologised poem, “The Horses” — collected in One Foot in Eden (Grove Press, 1956) — imagines a post-nuclear world in which strange archaic horses reappear, drawing humanity back toward the patient, animal, pre-industrial pace that Muir associated with his Orkney childhood. The poem is widely studied at GCSE and Higher level and is the single Orkney lyric most likely to appear on a British school syllabus.

Eric Linklater (1899–1974): Saga, Satire, Selkies

Eric Linklater is the wild card of the trio. He was born in Penarth, Wales on 8 March 1899 to an Orcadian father, and although he is often counted as a fully Orcadian writer, he came to the islands as a settler. He moved to Orkney with his wife in 1933 and lived there until 1947, when he relocated to Pitcalzean House in Ross-shire. He died on 7 November 1974, and was awarded a CBE in 1954.

Linklater wrote at speed and across genres. White Maa’s Saga (1929) drew on his student years in Aberdeen. The Men of Ness (1932) is a serious attempt at a modern Viking saga. Magnus Merriman (1934) is an acerbic fictionalised account of his unsuccessful 1933 Scottish National Party by-election candidacy — one of the funniest political novels in the language. And the title story of his 1947 collection Sealskin Trousers is the most influential modern retelling of the selkie myth.

If GMB is patient and Muir is melancholy, Linklater is acid. He used Orkney as a literary stage rather than a sacred landscape, and he was unsentimental in a way that makes him very readable now. The selkie story in particular has shaped almost every later treatment of the legend — including most of the contemporary fiction that draws on the seal-folk and other beings catalogued in our guide to Orkney folklore.

The Other Orkney Poets and Memoirists

Reducing Orkney’s literature to GMB, Muir and Linklater is a useful shorthand but a poor history. Three further writers belong in any serious reading list.

Reading any one of these alongside the “big three” widens the picture considerably. Rendall in particular is the writer most likely to surprise visitors: a working sonneteer in the Orcadian dialect, with the same patient eye on the shoreline that you find in late GMB.

The Orkney Writers’ Trail: A Walking Itinerary

Most of the places that shaped these writers are still walkable. A focused two-day trail can take in almost all of them.

The Stromness leg is the easiest and the most rewarding for first-time visitors — you can do it on foot in an afternoon from any base in town. Stromness accommodation in particular puts you a short walk from every site on the GMB trail.

Festivals, Libraries and Where to Buy the Books

Orkney has a denser cultural-festival calendar than its population would suggest. Two are explicitly literary or literary-adjacent:

• St Magnus International Festival (Midsummer, annually) — founded in 1977 by the composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and George Mackay Brown, and based at St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall. A week of music, drama and literature in the third week of June every year.
• Orkney Storytelling Festival (late October, annually) — a long weekend devoted to the islands’ oral tradition. Many of the stories told are the same ones GMB and Linklater reworked.
• Orkney Library & Archive (Kirkwall) — holds GMB’s personal library and manuscripts. Free to visit. (orkneylibrary.org.uk)
• Stromness Books & Prints — the independent bookshop in the heart of Hamnavoe. The single best place in the islands to buy GMB and Linklater first editions and current reprints.
• Pier Arts Centre (Stromness) — visual-art counterpart to the literary scene; the Margaret Gardiner collection upstairs is the single best small modern-art collection in Scotland. (pierartscentre.com)

The medieval foundation under all of this — the Orkneyinga Saga — is worth reading in Penguin Classics translation before you visit; almost every place name on a modern map is a transliteration of a name that appears in the saga. Our guide to Norse Orkney and the saga sets out the historical context.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Orkney’s most famous writer?

George Mackay Brown (1921–1996) is widely considered the most famous, with a body of work spanning five decades, an OBE in 1974, and a Booker Prize shortlisting in 1994 for Beside the Ocean of Time. He lived his whole life in Stromness, which makes a literary pilgrimage to the islands particularly easy.

Where can I buy George Mackay Brown’s books in Orkney?

Stromness Books & Prints on Victoria Street is the obvious starting point and stocks both new editions and second-hand first editions. The Orkney Library & Archive in Kirkwall holds GMB’s personal collection and manuscripts for research, but does not sell books.

Is there a literary festival in Orkney?

Yes — two. The St Magnus International Festival, founded in 1977 by Peter Maxwell Davies and George Mackay Brown, runs for a week each midsummer and includes literature alongside music. The Orkney Storytelling Festival runs in late October each year and is devoted to the islands’ oral tradition.

Did Edwin Muir live his whole life in Orkney?

No. Muir was born in Deerness on 15 May 1887, spent his early childhood on Wyre and then on the Orkney Mainland, and left the islands in 1901 at the age of fourteen when his family moved to Glasgow. He never lived in Orkney again, but the islands haunt every line he wrote — right up to his death in Cambridge in 1959.

Which Orkney places appear in the books?

Stromness (GMB’s Hamnavoe) is the most heavily mapped: Victoria Street, the pierhead, the Flattie Bar, Warebeth Beach. Rackwick Bay on Hoy appears in GMB’s An Orkney Tapestry and many of his poems. The island of Wyre is Muir’s lost Eden; you can visit Cubbie Roo’s Castle there. St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall is the setting for GMB’s novel Magnus (1973).

Is “The Horses” by Edwin Muir on the GCSE syllabus?

Yes — “The Horses” is one of the most widely-taught Muir poems on both UK GCSE English Literature and Scottish Higher syllabuses. It was first collected in One Foot in Eden (Grove Press, 1956) and is the single Orkney poem most likely to be familiar to British school-leavers.

What should I read before visiting Orkney?

If you have time for one book, choose George Mackay Brown’s An Orkney Tapestry (1969) — short, episodic prose essays that map almost every site you’ll visit. If you have time for two, add Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun (2016) for the contemporary view. If you have time for three, the Penguin Classics translation of the Orkneyinga Saga supplies the medieval foundation.

Orkney’s literary heritage is unusual in that almost every site is still walkable, still visible, and still funded by the trust that GMB and others helped establish. Read the books, then come and walk the ground. A few nights in Stromness put you within ten minutes of every important GMB location; a base near Kirkwall opens up the cathedral, the library and the ferry routes to Hoy and Wyre.