Lewis Grassic Gibbon is one of Scotland's most famous authors and hails from the Northeast. His real name was James Leslie Mitchell, under which most of his output was published. He was born in 1901 at Seggat of Auchterless (Aberdeenshire). At the age of eight the family moved to a farm near Drumlith in the Mearns (an area to the south of Aberdeen). He was educated at the local school in Drumlithie and then at Mackie Academy in Stonehaven, leaving at the age of sixteen. He became a journalist, working on the Aberdeen Journal and the Scottish Farmer.
After returning to the family farm due to illness he enlisted in the army and later served for eight years in the RAF as a clerk, spending some time in the middle-east.
In 1928 he left the RAF and began his literary career, writing sixteen books and many short pieces in the next seven years. The trilogy "A Scots Quair" is his most renowned work. The individual parts were 'Sunset Song' (1932), 'Cloud Howe' (1933) and 'Grey Granite' (1934). The three parts tell the story of Chris Guthrie as she progressed from being a daughter, through being a farmers wife in the Mearns and finally a widow and mother in a city which is widely assumed to be Aberdeen. The trilogy covers the last few years of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century. Lewis Grassic Gibbon had a great feeling for the countryside of the north, believing that civilisation was at its peak during the circle-building era of the Bronze Age. For him the innocence and happiness of those long gone days out weigh anything that the corrupt modern world can provide.
He died in 1935 after a brief literary career, during which his books were not immediately recognised for the classics that they were. Although it is impossible to say that Lewis Grassic Gibbon would have gone on to make an enormous impact on twentieth century English literature it seems a terrible shame that like so many talented men he had such a short life.
Today much of his literary work is recognised for the masterpieces that they are of the English language, ('Sunset Song' is included in the British National Curriculum) and his life is commemorated by the Lewis Grassic Gibbon Centre at Arbuthnot, off the A92 south of Aberdeen.
