[In the following obituary, Gussow recaps Brown's life and career.]

George Mackay Brown, a poet, novelist and short story writer whose work evoked the rugged life and the history and culture of the remote Orkney Islands in Scotland, died on Saturday in a hospital in Kirkwall in the Orkneys. He was 74.

Writing in the British magazine The Listener, Seamus Heaney said that Mr. Brown's imagination "is stirred by legends of the Viking warrior and Christian saint," and added, "It consecrates the visible survivals of history, and ruins of time, into altars that are decked with the writings themselves." Mr. Heaney said he had never seen Mr. Brown's poetry sufficiently praised.

Mr. Brown was born and remained rooted in the Orkneys, and his art was filled with the rich lore and humanity of the people he knew so well. He also explored Scottish myths and mysticism as well as rituals of the Roman Catholic faith. At the same time, he expressed a social consciousness, as in his first novel, Greenvoe, which described the death of a 1,000-year-old village at the hands of a military-industrial establishment.

Reviewing the author's collection A Time to Keep and Other Stories in The New York Times Book Review in 1987, Sheila Gordon wrote that in his "marvelous stories," the author "holds us in the same way the earliest storyteller held the group around the fire in an ancient cave."

Mr. Brown spoke with modesty about his own writing. He said he believed in "dedicated work rather than in 'inspiration,'" and added that writing was "a craft like carpentry, plumbing or baking; one does the best one can." With his thick thatch of hair and his strong jaw, and wearing the clothes of a workingman, he looked very much like the farmers and fishermen who populated his poems and stories.

He was born in the fishing town of Stromness. Leaving school at an early age, he worked as a journalist. At 30, he resumed his education at Newbattle Abbey College on the mainland, where he came under the tutelage of the poet Edwin Muir, who was also from the Orkneys. In 1954, Mr. Muir wrote the introduction to Mr. Brown's first collection of poetry, The Storm and Other Poems. Loaves and Fishes was published in 1959, followed by The Year of the Whale and Fishermen With Plows: A Poem Cycle, often regarded as his finest poetic work. His other books of verse include Winterfold and Poems New and Selected.

In the late 1980's he also began publishing books of short stories, beginning with A Calendar of Love and Other Stories. Among his other anthologies are Hawkfall and Other Stories and Andrina and Other Stories. The story "Andrina" was made into a television film by Bill Forsyth. In 1994, his novel Beside the Ocean of Time was one of six works of fiction shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

He collaborated with the composer Peter Maxwell Davies on a variety of musical works, including the opera "The Martyrdom of St. Magnus." In addition, he wrote plays, stories for children and essays about the Orkneys.