The Scottish poet George Mackay Brown drew inspiration first and foremost from his native Orkney Islands. On the twentieth anniversary of his death, his friend and biographer recalls her meetings with him there and the long road that led to his conversion to Catholicism

When I visited Orkney for the first time, the midsummer sun barely set: at midnight there was still a glow on the horizon. In a B&B near the harbour town of Stromness I sat up reading George Mackay Brown’s poetry, amazed by the freshness and precision of his imagery. A lark “splurges through galilees of sky”; sunset drove “a butcher blade” through the day’s throat; as a fisherman drowned the sea turned “a salt key in his last door of light”. I was due to interview Mackay Brown in the morning. I couldn’t wait.

But that first meeting was a disaster. I’d been warned that he was shy (“The tape recorder stood on the stool between us like an instrument of torture,” he wrote after one radio interview. “The microphone seemed to move towards me like a cobra”), but I’d hoped that my short, simple questions would put him at his ease. Not a bit of it. After answering each of them in polite monosyllables, he sat back in his rocking chair, leaned his lantern jaw on long, tapering hands and hummed.