Naomi Mitchison

Naomi Mitchison [1897-1999] was a literary phenomenon. Tireless in her writing, unafraid and often highly unconventional in her opinions, she left an extraordinary legacy. Her novels for adults and children – based on the classical ancient world, and on the immediately contemporary – stressed at different times her deep interest in Scottish and African societies, as well her concerns for the future. She also wrote poetry and plays, memoirs, a war diary, book reviews, political articles, and many letters.Moira Burgess is a novelist, short story writer and literary historian who lives in Glasgow. She is the author of Mitchison’s Ghosts (Humming Earth, 2008), on supernatural and mythical elements in the writing of Naomi Mitchison, and is Editor of a collected edition of Mitchison’s Essays and Journalism being published by Kennedy & Boyd.Isobel Murray is a Scottish literary scholar, Emeritus Professor at the University of Aberdeen. She has edited the work of Oscar Wilde and Naomi Mitchison, and a series of interviews which she and her husband Bob Tait carried out with Scottish writers. Her biography of Jessie Kesson (2000) won the National Library of Scotland / Saltire Society Scottish Research Book of the Year award.