Sunset Song

Lewis Grassic Gibbon was the pseudonym of James Leslie Mitchell (1901-1935), a Scottish writer. Mitchell started working as a journalist for the Aberdeen Journal and the Scottish Farmer at age 16. In 1919 he joined the Royal Army Service Corps and served in Persia, India and Egypt before enlisting in the Royal Air Force in 1920. He began writing full-time in 1929. Mitchell attracted attention from his earliest attempts at fiction, notably from H. G. Wells, but it was his trilogy entitled A Scots Quair, and in particular its first book Sunset Song (1932), with which he made his mark. A Scots Quair with its combination of realist narrative and lyrical use of dialect is considered to be among the defining works of 20th century Scottish Renaissance. The two other books in the trilogy are Cloud Howe (1933) and Grey Granite (1934). Amongst his other works are Stained Radiance (1930), The Lost Trumpet (1932) and The Conquest of the Maya (1934).