page_title: Edwin Muir
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Edwin Muir / Biography
caption_attribution_description: English: Memorial to George Mackay Brown, Edwin Muir and Stanley Cursiter in Kirkwall Cathedral, Orkney
context_page_description: Edwin Muir was a Scottish poet, novelist and translator. Born on a farm in Deerness, a parish of Orkney, Scotland, he is remembered for his deeply felt and vivid poetry written in plain language and with few stylistic preoccupations. His wife, Willa Muir, translated the works of many German authors, including Franz Kafka. These were issued under their joint names, but his wife notes that he "only helped".
context_section_description: Muir was born at the farm of Folly in Deerness, the same parish in which his mother was born. The family then moved to the island of Wyre, followed by a return to the Mainland, Orkney. In 1901, when he was 14, his father lost his farm, and the family moved to Glasgow. In quick succession his father, two brothers, and his mother died within the space of a few years. His life as a young man was a depressing experience, and involved a raft of unpleasant jobs in factories and offices, including working in a factory that turned bones into charcoal.  "He suffered psychologically in a most destructive way, although perhaps the poet of later years benefitted from these experiences as much as from his Orkney 'Eden'." In 1919, Muir married Willa Anderson, and the couple moved to London. About this, Muir wrote simply 'My marriage was the most fortunate event in my life'. Willa and her new husband worked together on many translations notable of these are those by Franz Kafka. They had translated The Castle within six years of Kafka's death. Willa was the more able linguist and she was the major contributor. Willa recorded in her journal that "It was ME" and that Edwin "only helped". Between 1924 and the start of the Second World War her (their) translation financed their life together. He would help her translate highly acclaimed English translations of Franz Kafka, Gerhart Hauptmann, Sholem Asch, Heinrich Mann, and Hermann Broch.
  Between 1921 and 1923, Muir lived in Prague, Dresden, Italy, Salzburg and Vienna; he returned to the UK in 1924. Between 1925 and 1956, Muir published seven volumes of poetry which were collected after his death and published in 1991 as The Complete Poems of Edwin Muir. From 1927 to 1932 he published three novels, and in 1935 he came to St Andrews, where he produced his controversial Scott and Scotland (1936). In 1939 in St Andrews, Muir had a religious experience and from then onwards thought of himself as Christian, seeing Christianity as being as revolutionary as socialism.  From 1946 to 1949 he was Director of the British Council in Prague and Rome. 1950 saw his appointment as Warden of Newbattle Abbey College (a college for working-class men) in Midlothian, where he met fellow Orcadian poet, George Mackay Brown. In 1955 he was made Norton Professor of English at Harvard University. He returned to Britain in 1956 but died in 1959 at Swaffham Prior, Cambridgeshire, and was buried there.
  A memorial bench was erected in 1962 to Muir in the idyllic village of Swanston, Edinburgh, where he spent time during the 1950s. His wife wrote a memoir of their life together in 1967. She lived for another eleven years and died on the Isle of Bute.
caption: Memorial to Edwin Muir in St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall, Orkney
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