Born with an Oar in her Fists:
Ann Scott-Moncrieff – A Talk by Jean Findlay
The George Mackay Brown Memorial Lecture has been an annual event since the Fellowship was founded in 2006. It has featured not only George Mackay Brown but other Orkney writers too – poet Robert Rendall and poet, writer & film maker Margaret Tait.
This year our Lecture focuses on the Orkney writer Ann Scott-Moncrieff. She was born in Kirkwall at the start of World War 1 in 1914 but did not live to see the end of World War 2; she died in 1943 aged just 29.
Her early death might partly explain that she is little known as a writer today – but the range and quality of her writing in the years of young adulthood show an already accomplished writer who could have achieved still more. George Mackay Brown wrote:
"We shall never know how much Scottish literature lost by that early death. She left behind only a small amount of poetry, but sufficient to indicate what an outstanding poet she would have become."
The early poems composed when she was aged 18-19 reveal a thoughtful young woman and committed writer.
She produced journalism, short stories, some of them published in newspapers and magazines of her time, two children’s novels and scripts and adaptations for the BBC Radio Education service. Her lifelong friend from Orkney, Hannah Rendall, who died in 2006, described this as the work that put ‘bread and butter’ on the table …
I’m delighted to welcome Jean Findlay here as our guest for this year’s Memorial Lecture. She is a writer herself, the author of Chasing Lost Time the acclaimed biography of poet, translator, inspirational army commander and spy, Charles Scott-Moncrieff.
She is the founder of Scotland Street Press, which has published a number of well-known writers, including Stewart Conn and Gerda Stevenson, but aims to bring to light new work from new writers.
And she is the granddaughter of the subject of tonight’s presentation, Ann Scott-Moncrieff. Jean Findlay, a huge welcome to Orkney!
