First Edition

Christopher Murray Grieve, known by his pen name Hugh MacDiarmid (11 August 1892 – 9 September 1978) was a Scottish poet.
He was instrumental in creating a Scottish version of modernism and was a leading light in the Scottish Renaissance of the 20th century. Unusually for a first generation modernist, he was a communist; unusually for a communist, he was a committed Scottish nationalist. He wrote both in English and in literary Scots (often referred to as Lallans).
MacDiarmid was born Christopher Murray Grieve in 1892, in the Scottish Border town of Langholm.[1] His father was a postman; his family lived above the town library, giving MacDiarmid access to books from an early age. After leaving school in 1910, he worked as a journalist for five years, before serving 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.