Edwin Muir grew up on farms in Orkney. In 1901, when he was fourteen, the family left for Glasgow, and within a few years he had lost his parents and two brothers. He worked in offices and factories, one of them a bone-processing works. He taught himself German, read Nietzsche, married Willa Anderson in 1919, and spent the early 1920s moving between Prague, Dresden, Italy, Salzburg and Vienna.
He came to poetry late. First Poems appeared in 1925, when he was in his late thirties. The verse keeps to traditional metres, yet it is full of dream, myth and fable, and it returns again and again to a lost childhood Eden and to the damage of twentieth-century war. He also wrote three novels, among them The Marionette (1927), critical books such as The Structure of the Novel, the travel and social study Scottish Journey (1935), and an autobiography that began as The Story and the Fable in 1940.
Later he worked for the British Council in Prague and Rome. As warden of Newbattle Abbey, an adult education college near Edinburgh, he encouraged the young George Mackay Brown. He was made a CBE in 1953 and taught at Harvard in 1955-56. In 1958 he and Willa shared the Johann-Heinrich-Voss Translation Award. Their The Trial, published in 1937, was the first English translation of Kafka's novel.
Where to start: if you came here from The Trial, you have already met Muir, because Kafka reached English readers through the Muirs' prose. For his own voice, try the Selected Poems edited by Mick Imlah, or An Autobiography, which follows him from Orkney to Glasgow and then across Europe.
