| Administrative History | Iain Crichton Smith was born in Glasgow in 1928 to parents of Highland origin. When he was a year old his father died and the family moved to the Isle of Lewis, where his first language was Gaelic. The family of three boys survived on the widow's pension of his mother, and at age 11 Crichton Smith passed a bursary exam, which enabled him to continue his education at the Nicholson Institute at Stornoway and then the University of Aberdeen. After graduating in English in 1949 Crichton Smith became a secondary school teacher at various locations around the west of Scotland. He continued to publish novels, poems and short stories, and his work from these years includes his masterpiece, 'Consider The Lilies' (1968). He retired from schoolteaching to pursue writing full-time in 1977 and lived near Oban until his death in 1998. Although he published in both English and Scots Gaelic for economic reasons much of his later work was in English. |