Hugh MacDiarmid

Christopher Murray Grieve, known by his pen name Hugh MacDiarmid, was a Scottish poet, journalist, essayist and political figure. He is best known for his works written in 'synthetic Scots', a literary version of the Scots language that MacDiarmid himself developed.

Christopher Grieve was born in Langholm in 1892. His father was a postman; his family lived above the town library, giving MacDiarmid access to books from an early age. Grieve attended Langholm Academy and, from 1908, Broughton Junior Student Centre in Edinburgh, where he studied under George Ogilvie who introduced him to the magazine The New Age. He left the school on 27 January 1911, following the theft of some books and postage stamps; his father died eight days later, on 3 February 1911.

Following Grieve's departure from Broughton, Ogilvie arranged for Grieve to be employed as a journalist with the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch. Grieve was to lose this job later in 1911, but on 20 July of that year he had his first article, "The Young Astrology" published in The New Age.

In July 1915 Grieve left the town of Forfar in eastern Scotland and travelled to the Hillsborough barracks in Sheffield. He went on to serve in the Royal Army Medical Corps in Salonica, Greece and France during the First World War. After the war, he married and returned to journalism.

MacDiarmid's first book, Annals of the Five Senses, was a mixture of prose and poetry written in English, and was published in 1923 while MacDiarmid was living in Montrose. At about this time MacDiarmid turned to Scots for a series of books, culminating in what is probably his best known work, the book-length A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle.

From 1929 to 1930 MacDiarmid lived in London, and worked for Compton Mackenzie's magazine, Vox. MacDiarmid lived in Liverpool from 1930 to 1931, before returning to London; he left again in 1932, and lived in the village of Thakeham in West Sussex until he returned to Scotland in 1932. MacDiarmid lived in the island of Whalsay, Shetland, from 1933 until 1942. In 1942 MacDiarmid was directed to war work and moved to Glasgow, where he lived until 1949. Between 1949 and 1951 he lived in a cottage on the grounds of Dungavel House, Lanarkshire, before moving to his final home: "Brownsbank", a cottage in Candymill, near Biggar in the Scottish Borders.

He died at the age 86, in Edinburgh.