Announcing the forthcoming publication of Ian Niall: Part of his Life by Andrew McNeillie, available March 2007 ‘…We owe Andrew McNeillie a great debt for reintroducing us to the most neglected of writers.’ Douglas Gifford Ian Niall was the pen name of John McNeillie (1916-2002). Between them they wrote more than forty books, over a period of as many years, from 1939 when at twenty-two John McNeillie published Wigtown Ploughman: Part of His Life, with Putnam of London and New York, a Scottish classic still in print, a book that raised a national controversy, leading to housing reform. As Ian Niall, author of the novel No Resting Place (1948), filmed in Ireland by Paul Rotha, he would go on to…
Tag: Prose
TLS Review, 19th November 2004
John McNeillie My Childhood pp148. Thame: Clutag. £20. 0954727509 John McNeillie is better known as Ian Niall, under which pen name he became a major figure in British nature writing of the twentieth century. A Scotsman who ended up living in North Wales, McNeillie wrote more than forty books, mostly on rural themes. He was, notes his son (the poet Andrew McNeillie) in the introduction to My Childhood, “a kind of lyric poet in prose, and an elegist who had known Eden”. That Eden was North Clutag Farm, a remote steading in Wigtownshire in the Scottish borders, where McNeillie grew up under the care of his grandparents in the late 1910s and 20s. It is these years that are the…
My Childhood Book Launch
My Childhood, John McNeillie’s previously unpublished account of his childhood and youth-time at North Clutag farm, will be launched at the Wigtown Booktown Sixth Annual Literary Festival on Saturday 25th September 2004. Andrew McNeillie will be talking about the book and selling copies at the Festival. [wpsc_products product_id=’546′]