George Mackay Brown Papers

The George Mackay Brown Papers (Coll-50) include materials relating to most of Brown's major works and correspondence with other important Scottish writers.

There are manuscript materials for each of George Mackay Brown's five novels, for five volumes of short stories (A Calendar of Love, Hawkfall, Andrina, The Golden Bird, and The Masked Fisherman), and for fifteen volumes of poetry from The Storm (1954) to Orfeo (1995). The papers cover the full range of Brown's prolific and multi-form work, including drafts and final versions for children's stories, drama, librettos, radio broadcasts, essays, and reviews.

The papers include essays and critical works by Brown on other Scottish writers represented in EUL collections, including Edwin and Willa Muir, Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig, and Tom Scott. Correspondence includes letters from Mackay Brown to Helen Cruickshank, Sydney Goodsir Smith, and Willa Muir.

The Mackay Brown papers are an invaluable resource, not only for Mackay Brown scholars but also for any researcher with an interest in the development of 20th-century Scottish writing across the many genres in which Mackay Brown excelled (poetry, novels, short stories, drama, children’s writing, autobiography) or in relations between some of Scotland's major writers.

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George Mackay Brown in Other EUL Collections

There is further material of Mackay Brown interest in other EUL collections, including letters to Mackay Brown from Edwin Muir, letters from Mackay Brown to Helen Cruickshank, Hamish Henderson, Maurice Lindsay, and Fred Urquhart, and critical material on Mackay Brown by Norman MacCaig.