The Scottish poet and novelist George Mann MacBeth was born in Shotts, Lanarkshire, on 19 January 1932. When he was three, his family moved to Sheffield and he was educated at King Edward VII School in the city, before studying at New College, Oxford, with an Open Scholarship in Classics.

On graduating from Oxford, he joined BBC Radio in 1955, working as a producer of programmes on poetry, notably for the BBC Third Programme, until 1976. He would then resign from the BBC to take up novel writing, and he introduced a series of thrillers involving the spy, Cadbury.

After a divorce from his first wife, he married the novelist Lisa St Aubin de Terán (b. 1953), and then after a second divorce, he moved with his third wife to Ireland to live at Moyne Park, Abbeyknockmoy, near Tuam in County Galway. Shortly afterwards he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, dying with this in 1992.

His work spans four decades and includes: A Form of Words (1954); the editing of the Penguin Book of Sick Verse (1963), and of the Penguin Book of Animal Verse (1965), and the Penguin Book of Victorian Verse (1969); Missile Commander (1965); Shrapnel (1972); the thriller The Samurai (1976); the thriller Cadbury and the Samurai (1981); The Long Darkness (1984); Trespassing. Poems from Ireland (1991); and, the novel The Testament of Spencer (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. His Poems from Oby (1982) was a Choice of the Poetry Book Society. Macbeth received a Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for his work.

George Mann Macbeth died in Tuam, Co. Galway, Ireland on 13 February 1992.