George MacBeth

George MacBeth

George Mann MacBeth (19 January 1932 – 16 February 1992) was a Scottish poet and novelist. He was born in Shotts, Lanarkshire.

When he was three, his family moved to Sheffield. He was educated in Sheffield at King Edward VII School where he was Head Prefect in 1951 (photo), before going up to New College, Oxford, with an Open Scholarship in Classics.

He joined BBC Radio on graduating in 1955 from the University of Oxford. He worked there, as a producer of programmes on poetry, notably for the BBC Third Programme, until 1976. He was a member of The Group.

He resigned from the BBC to take up novel writing; he introduced a series of thrillers involving the spy, Cadbury. In his later post-BBC years, after divorcing his first wife, he married the novelist Lisa St Aubin de Terán, by whom he had a child, Alexander Morton George MacBeth, and after an acrimonious divorce, moved with his new wife, Penny, to Ireland to live at Moyne Park, Abbeyknockmoy, near Tuam in County Galway. A few months later, George MacBeth was diagnosed as suffering from motor neurone disease, of which he died in early 1992. In the last poetry he wrote, MacBeth provides an anatomy of a cruel disease and the destruction it caused two people deeply in love. Penny and George had two children, Diana ("Lally") Francesca Ronchetti MacBeth and George Edward Morton Mann MacBeth.

Poems from Oby (1982) was a Choice of the Poetry Book Society; Oby is a Norfolk village. He received a Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for his work.

He died in Tuam, County Galway, Ireland.