Christmas Stories

George Mackay Brown was born in Stromness, Orkney, on 17 October 1921. He died there in 1996. His many awards include a Society of Authors Travel Award, 1968; SAC Literature Prize, 1969; Katherine Mansfield Menton Short Story Prize, 1971; Hon. LLD from Dundee University, 1977; OBE, 1974; James Tait Black Memorial Prize 1987 (for The Golden Bird). He was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1994 for his novel Beside the Ocean of Time. He grew up in fairly straitened circumstances as his father was unable to work through illness. Mackay Brown himself suffered from tuberculosis as a young man. In his twenties he worked as a journalist on the Orkney Herald, but at the age of 30 he left Orkney to study at Newbattle Abbey College, near Edinburgh, where he met Edwin Muir, who was Warden at the time, a meeting that had a profound influence on him. He left behind him an extraordinary body of work: novels, short stories, poetry, journalism and even two operatic collaborations with Peter Maxwell Davis. Christmas Stories gathers together all the short stories that he wrote each Christmas for The Herald and/or The Tablet during the 1970s and early 80s. Some have been published in other collections, some here for the first time. But every single one of them is a finely crafted jewel, every one of them a resonance of that totally original voice that can only be that of Mackay Brown. The book includes wood and lino cuts by John Lawrence and Rosemary Roberts. His first book of poems 'The Storm' is also published by Galileo, with an introduction by Kathleen Jamie.