Linden Bicket is Lecturer in Literature and Religion in the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Her research focuses on patterns of faith and scepticism in twentieth-century fiction and poetry.

Kirsteen McCue is Professor of Scottish Literature & Song Culture and Co-Director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow. She has published widely on song culture and is co-editor with Pam Perkins of Women's Travel Writings in Scotland (Taylor & Francis, 2016). She teaches an undergraduate course called 'Scottish Journeys', featuring An Orkney Tapestry.

George Mackay Brown (1921-96) was one of the twentieth century's most distinguished and original writers. His lifelong inspiration and birthplace, Stromness in Orkney, moulded his view of the world, though he studied in Edinburgh and later at Newbattle Abbey College. In 1941 he was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis and lived an increasingly reclusive life in Stromness, but he produced a regular stream of publications from 1954 onwards. These included A Calendar of Love (1967), A Time to Keep (1969), Greenvoe (1972), Hawkfall (1974), and, notably, the novel Beside the Ocean of Time (1994), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Saltire Book of the Year.