For the islands he WROTE
Many writers are identified with specific places. Take Thomas Hardy and Dorset, and William Wordsworth and the Lake District, for example. However, perhaps no author has been so intimately associated with their locale as George Mackay Brown.
For Mackay Brown, the Orkney Islands, where he was born, grew up and spent almost all his adult life, are at the heart of practically everything he wrote. For a writer of international reputation, he rarely strayed far from the little port of Stromness, where he first saw the light of day 100 years ago, on 17 October 1921.
His father, John, was a
