Encyclopedia > Ian Hamilton Finlay

  Article Content

Ian Hamilton Finlay

Ian Hamilton Finlay (born 1925) is a Scottish poet, writer, artist and gardener.

Finlay was born in Nassau in the Bahamas but was educated in Scotland. At the age of 13, with the outbreak of World War II, he was evacuated to the Orkney Islands. In 1942 he joined the army.

At the end of the war, Finlay worked as a shepherd before beginning to write short stories and poems. He published books including The Sea Bed and Other Stories (1958) and The Dancers Inherit the Party (1960), and some of his work was broadcasted by the BBC.

In 1963, Finlay published Rapel, his first collection of concrete poetry (poetry in which the layout and typography of the words contributes to its overall effect), and it was as a concrete poet that he first gained wide renown. Eventually he began to inscribe his poems into stone, incorporating these sculptures into the natural environment.

This kind of environmental poetry features in his garden "Little Sparta" near Edinburgh, where he lives. The garden also includes more conventional sculptures and temple-like buildings as well as plants.

Finlay was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1985.

External link



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
Kings Park, New York

... in the town is $69,819, and the median income for a family is $80,952. Males have a median income of $53,125 versus $36,008 for females. The per capita income for the ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 63.9 ms