Edwin Muir was born at the end of the 19th century (1887-1959) on the Orkney Islands, a group of small islands off the north coast of Scotland. He was a novelist and translator as well as being and one of Scotland’s most important poets of the 1900s.

Muir grew up on a farm in Deerness, a remote easterly part of Orkney. In 1901, when aged fourteen, his father lost the farm and took his family to Glasgow where he looked for work. Edwin later described this as the ‘fallen’ world, and contrasted it to his ‘Eden’ in Orkney. Within four years his parents and two of his brothers had died. Edwin was forced to find uninspiring work just to live. He suffered a mental breakdown and depression, the latter affecting him and his poetry for the rest of his life.

In 1919 Muir married Willa Anderson and they moved to London, and then to Prague, Dresden, Italy, Salzburg and Vienna in the early 1920s. They returned to England in 1924 and collaborated on English translations of Franz Kafka, Gerhart Hauptmann, Sholem Asch, Heinrich Mann, and Hermann Broch. In 1925 Muir published the first of the seven volumes of poetry he was to produce in the years to 1956.

Between 1927 and 1932, Muir published three novels, then moved with Willa to St Andrews in 1935. He published in 1936 a highly contentious and uppopular theory that Scotland could create a national literature by writing in English.

Muir was Director of the British Council in Prague and Rome. In 1955 he was appointed Professor of English at Harvard University. He returned to England in 1956 and died in 1959 in Cambridgeshire.