MacDiarmid, Hugh
Entry updated 1 December 2024. Tagged: Author.
Pseudonym of Scottish journalist, editor and author Christopher Murray Grieve (1892-1978), in active service during World War One; some of his vast oeuvre contains poems – usually Satirical from a standpoint of radical Scottish nationalism – that use devices common to Fantastika to make their points. Sf is found less often, though it is sharply put, as in "The Bonnie Broukit Bairn", in Sangschaw (coll 1925 chap), where an awakened Earth is seen as capable of destroying the whole Solar System, here described as a clanjamfrie, Scots for jumble or chaos. MacDiarmid's advocacy of Harry Martinson's Aniara (1956), which he co-translated, helped bring it to wide attention. His fiction was infrequent, though he published several tales of horror for John Gawsworth's New Tales of Horror by Eminent Authors (anth 1934). [JC]
Christopher Murray Grieve
born Langholm, Dumfriesshire, Scotland: 11 August 1892
died Edinburgh, Scotland: 9 September 1978
works (highly selected)
collections
- Sangschaw (Edinburgh, Scotland: William Blackwood, 1925) [poetry: coll: chap: hb/nonpictorial]
- The Complete Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid 1920-1976 (London: Martin Brian and O'Keeffe, 1976) [poetry: coll: published in two volumes: hb/nonpictorial]
works as translator
- Harry Martinson. Aniara: A Review of Man in Time and Space (London: Hutchinson, 1963) [poem: trans with Elspeth Harley Schubert of Aniara (1956): hb/Brian Russell]
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