Norman MacCaig, who was a prolific writer of poetry, worked as a schoolteacher in Edinburgh for most of his life. He studied classics before training to be a teacher at Moray House in Edinburgh. After the Second World War, during which he adopted a pacifist stance, MacCaig continued to teach and in 1967 became the first Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. Both his home city of Edinburgh and his holiday home in Assynt, in the north-west of Scotland, provided inspiration for his poetry. His early works belong to the New Apocalypse Movement, a surrealist mode of writing which he later abandoned in favour of a wittier and more elegant style. His fame grew later in life; he was awarded an OBE in 1979 and in 1986 received the Queen’s Medal for Poetry.