The Scottish poet Sorley MacLean was born in Oscaig, Raasay, on 26 October 1911. He was educated locally and then at Portree High School. He studied English Literature at Edinburgh University from 1929, graduating in 1933 with a First. MacLean then began a teaching career, starting in Portree after qualifying from Moray House (teacher training college). Briefly between 1937-1938 he taught at Tobermoray Secondary School before returning to Edinburgh in 1939 to the English Department of Boroughmuir High School.

In 1940, MacLean joined the Signals Corps and was posted to North Africa. He was seriously wounded at El Alamein in November 1942, and was invalided home to Scotland. He returned to his teaching post at Boroughmuir in 1943. In 1946 he married Renee Cameron. Although their life seemed settled in Edinburgh, and Sorley had been drawn into the literary circle of Douglas Young and his associates, which included George Campbell Hay, Norman McCaig, and especially Robert Garioch (Alastair Sutherland), he accepted the appointment of Headmaster at Plockton High School in 1956.

MacLean's output included Seventeen Poems for Six-pence (with Garioch, 1940), Dain do Eimhir (1943), and co-authorship of Four Points of a Saltire (1970).

He retired as Headmaster at Plockton in 1972 but then found himself drawn into a new educational experience, first as the Creative Writing Fellow at Edinburgh University (1973-5) and then as Filidh (‘Poet’) at the then embryonic Gaelic College at Sabhal Mor Ostaig (1975-6).

Sorley MacLean died in Inverness on 24 November 1996.