Eric Linklater

Eric Robert Russell Linklater (8 March 1899 – 7 November 1974) was a Welsh-born Scottish writer of novels and short stories, military history, and travel books. For The Wind on the Moon, a children's fantasy novel, he won the 1944 Carnegie Medal from the Library Association for the year's best children's book by a British subject.

Linklater was born in Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan, Wales, to the Orcadian master mariner Robert Baikie Linklater (1865–1916) and his wife Mary Elizabeth (c.1867–1957), daughter of James Young, also a master mariner. He was educated in Aberdeen Grammar School and Aberdeen University, where he was President of the Aberdeen University Debater. He spent many years in Orkney, and identified strongly with the islands, where his father had been born. His maternal grandfather was a Swedish-born sea captain, and he thus had Scandinavian origins through both parents. Linklater is a local Orkney name derived from the Old Norse, and throughout life he maintained a sympathetic interest in Scandinavia.

Linklater served in the Black Watch in 1917–18 before receiving a bullet wound. He then became a sniper. His experiences of trench warfare are described graphically in his memoir Fanfare for a Tin Hat (1970) and at one remove in his 1938 novel The Impregnable Women, which describes an imaginary war against France.

While an undergraduate at Aberdeen University in 1922, Linklater wrote the first musical comedy for the Aberdeen Student Show, ‘Stella, the Bajanella’, with music by JS Taylor. 24 years later, during Linklater's tenure as Rector of Aberdeen University, his play 'To Meet the Macgregors' was performed as the 1946 Student Show.

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