Early life 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. He lost the 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 October 1911, Grieve moved to
Ebbw Vale in
Monmouthshire,
Wales where he worked as a newspaper reporter; by 1913 he had returned to Scotland and was working for the
Clydebank and Renfrew Press in
Clydebank, near
Glasgow. It was here that Grieve first encountered the work of
John Maclean, Neil Malcolm Maclean, and
James Maxton.
First World War 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.
Return to Scotland 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. This poem is widely regarded as one of the most important long poems in 20th-century
Scottish literature. After that, he published several books containing poems in both English and Scots.
Time in England 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.
Whalsay, Shetland MacDiarmid lived in
Sodom on the island of
Whalsay, Shetland, from 1933 until 1942. He often asked the local fishermen to take him out in their boats and once asked them to leave him on an uninhabited island for a night and pick him up again in the morning. Local legend has it that he asked about Whalsay words and some of the Whalsay folk made up fantastical words that did not exist. The dialect is strong on the island and any strange words would have probably sounded quite plausible. "The often tormented genius wrote much of his finest poetry (including 'On a Raised Beach') and, via the Whalsay post office, conducted furious correspondence with the leading writers and thinkers of his generation." The croft house that was his Whalsay home was later made into a camping
böd (traditionally a building used to house fishermen and their gear), the Grieves House böd, run by Shetland Amenity Trust. It is in a state of disrepair and "closed for maintenance" as of 2022.
Return to the Scottish mainland 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
Lanarkshire. He died, aged 86, in
Edinburgh. ==Politics==