John Manson was born in 1932 in Caithness where his parents were crofters. In his early twenties his mother and he moved to a croft in Sutherland, the county from which his great-grandmother had been cleared. He has also lived in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire, Motherwell, Roxburghshire, Cumbria, Edinburgh, Fife, and for 37 years in Galloway. John's working life has been spent in crofting, reading/writing and teaching. Since early retirement he has focussed on research on Scottish authors of the 1930s, mainly Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and James Barke, as well as on translation of prose and poetry into English and of poetry into Scots. His publications include co-editorship with David Craig of the first Penguin paperback edition of Hugh MacDiarmid: Selected Poems (1970); co-editorship of The Revolutionary Art of the Future: Rediscovered Poems by Hugh MacDiarmid, with Dorian Grieve and Alan Riach (Carcanet Press, 2003). He selected and edited Dear Grieve: Letters to Hugh MacDiarmid (Kennedy and Boyd, 2011).