Lewis Grassic Gibbon was the pseudonym of James Leslie Mitchell, a Scottish writer. He was best known for his trilogy A Scots Quair, set in the north-east of Scotland in early years of the 20th century.
Biography
Born in Auchterless, and raised in Arbuthnott in the former county of Kincardineshire, Mitchell started working as a journalist for the Aberdeen Journal in 1917, and later for the Farmers Weekly after moving to Glasgow. Gibbon grew up in Stonehaven, and attended Mackie Academy. Around that time he was active with the British Socialist Party. In 1919, Mitchell joined the Royal Army Service Corps and served in Iran, India and Egypt before enlisting in the Royal Air Force in 1920. In the RAF he worked as a clerk and spent some time in the Middle East. When he married Rebecca Middleton in 1925, they settled in Welwyn Garden City. He began writing full time in 1929, producing numerous books and shorter works under his real name and his pseudonym. He suffered an early death in 1935 from peritonitis brought on by a perforated ulcer.
Fiction
Mitchell attracted attention from his earliest attempts at fiction, notably from H. G. Wells, but it was his trilogy entitled A Scots Quair, and in particular its first book Sunset Song, with which he made his mark. A Scots Quair, with its combination of stream-of-consciousness, lyrical use of dialect, and social realism, is considered to be among the defining works of the 20th century Scottish Renaissance. It tells the story of Chris Guthrie, a young woman growing up in the north-east of Scotland in the early 20th century. All three parts of the trilogy have been turned into serials by BBC Scotland, written by Bill Craig, with Vivien Heilbron as Chris. Additionally, Sunset Song has been adapted into a film, released in 2015. Spartacus, a novel set in the famous slave revolt, is his best-known full-length work outside this trilogy. In 1934 Mitchell collaborated with Hugh MacDiarmid on Scottish Scene, which included three of Gibbon's short stories. His stories were collected posthumously in A Scots Hairst. Possibly his best-known is "Smeddum", a Scots word which could be best translated as the colloquial term "guts". Like A Scots Quair, it is set in north-east Scotland with strong female characters. It was dramatised by Bill Craig and the BBC, as a Play for Today in 1976, along with two other short stories, "Clay" and "Greenden". Also notable is his essay The Land.
Remembrance
The Grassic Gibbon Centre was established in Arbuthnott in 1991 to commemorate the author's life. There is a memorial to him and his wife, and other members of the Mitchell family, in the western corner of the village churchyard of Arbuthnott, nowadays in Aberdeenshire. In 2016 Sunset Song was voted Scotland's favourite novel in the BBC Love to Read campaign. A feature article on the novel has been written by Nicola Sturgeon, who edited a recent edition.
