George Campbell Hay

George Campbell Hay (Deòrsa MacIain Dheòrsa), a multilingual poet and figure of the Scottish literary renaissance, was born in Renfrewshire in 1915. His father, the novelist, John Macdougall Hay, author of the novel, Gillespie, died when George was four, after which the family moved to Argyll, an area of Scotland which was then home to many Gaelic speakers. That background gave George a lifelong interest in Gaelic culture.

After an education in Edinburgh and Oxford he served in the British Army during World War II in North Africa. ‘Mochtar is Dughall’, one of Campbell Hay’s best-known works, draws its inspiration from this time. Campbell Hay went on to produce a body of work in English, Gaelic and Lowland Scots, as well as French, Italian and Norwegian, much of which was not published in book form during his lifetime. Instead, he was a frequent contributor to periodicals and magazines such as Gairm, the Gaelic-language magazine, edited by Derick Thomson for many years. A Collected Poems and Songs, edited by Michel Byrne, appeared in 2000. Campbell Hay died in 1984.