Tom Scott (poet)

Tom Scott (6 June 1918 – 7 August 1995) was a Scottish poet, editor, and prose writer. His writing is closely tied to the New Apocalypse, the New Romantics, and the Scottish Renaissance.

Scott was born in Glasgow, Scotland, the son of a Clydeside boilermaker. With the onset of the Depression, the family moved to St. Andrews in Fife, where Tom worked briefly as a butcher's assistant before becoming an apprentice stonemason in his uncle's business.

During World War II he served in the British Army in Britain and Nigeria. After the war he lived in London for a while, moving in the same literary and social circles as Kathleen Raine, Dylan Thomas and Louis MacNeice. He then studied at the University of Edinburgh where he graduated with an M.A. with Honours in English Literature and a PhD for research on the poetry of William Dunbar.

Scott's first poems were published in 1941. He received an Atlantic Award for Literature in 1950 and traveled in France, Italy, and Sicily. During his travels he became interested in literature in Scots, his own native language, which shaped the direction of his work for the rest of his life.

He settled in Edinburgh and in 1953 married Heather Fretwell. He died on 6 June 1995 at the age of 77.