The Dear Green Place

Set in nineteen-sixties Glasgow, The Dear Green Place is a portrait of the struggles and conflicts of a young working-class hero and would-be novelist Mat Craig whose desire to define himself as an artist creates social and family tensions.   This classic of Scottish twentieth-century literature is an absorbing and moving story. With vivid descriptions of the city around Mat, it remains as authentic and relevant as it was more than fifty years after its original publication.

Archie Hind was born in 1928. Educated in Glasgow, where he has spent most of his life, his jobs have included bus driving, glass sculpting and data processing. He studied writing for a year at Newbattle College under Edwin Muir and attended WEA lectures by Jack Rillie of the English Department at Glasgow University; both men were to influence him and his writing. The Dear Green Place first published in 1966 is Hind's only novel and won both the Guardian Fiction Award and the Yorkshire Post's Award for Best Book.