Books by Mairi MacInnes

Mairi MacInnes (1925-2017) was born in Norton-on-Tees, Co. Durham, and educated in Helmsley and at Somerville College, Oxford. She married the American literary critic John McCormick, and followed him to the Frei Universitat after the war and then to the USA, where she raised their three children in the wilds of Maine, then Rutgers, with time out in Mexico and Spain. After a promising start with a poetry collection Splinters (1953) and novel Admit One (1956), her literary career stalled. It was only with the publication of Herring, Oatmeal, Milk & Salt (1982) that she really launched herself as a poet. Returning to England with John and their three children in 1987, she spent the last 30 years of her life in Yorkshire, in the Yorkshire Wolds and York. Her subsequent collections included The House on the Ridge Road (1988), Elsewhere and Back: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1993), The Ghostwriter (Bloodaxe Books, 1999), The Pebble: Old and New Poems (University of Illinois Press, 2000), The Girl I Left Behind Me: Poems of a Lifetime (Shoestring Press, 2003) and Amazing Memories of Childhood, etc (Two Rivers Press, 2016). In 2014 she was awarded an Honorary Degree from the University of York. Beside poetry, she wrote another novel The Quondam Wives (Louisiana State University Press, 1993) and a memorable autobiography, Clearances (Pantheon, 2002).