Andrew Greig is one of the leading Scottish writers of his generation. He has published eight collections of poetry, many of these with Bloodaxe, including The Order of the Day (Poetry Book Society Choice, 1990), This Life, This Life: New & Selected Poems 1970-2006 (2006), and As Though We Were Flying (2011), which was shortlisted in the poetry section of the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Awards in 2012. His most recent poetry titles are Getting Higher: the complete mountain poems (2011), Found at Sea (2013) and Later That Day (2020), all from Polygon.
Known as ‘the poet laureate of climbing’, he published his collected poems of mountain adventures real and metaphorical as Getting Higher with Birlinn in 2011. Two books on his Himalayan expeditions have become classics in their field, as have Preferred Lies (a meditation on golf, self-recovery, Scotland) and At the Loch of the Green Corrie (fishing for Norman MacCaig, catching much else besides). His eight novels include That Summer (Faber, 2000), The Return of John Macnab (Headline, 1996) and its late sequel Romanno Bridge (Quercus, 2008), In Another Light (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004), which was Saltire Scottish Book of the Year, and most recently, Fair Helen (Quercus, 2013) and Rose Nicolson: Memoir of William Fowler of Edinburgh: student, trader, makar, conduit, would-be Lover in early days of our Reform (riverrun, 2021), which was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize. His memoir, You Know What You Could Be: tuning into the 1960s (with Mike Heron) was published by Quercus in 2017. He lives in Edinburgh and Orkney with his wife, novelist Lesley Glaister.
