A former shepherd, actor, counsellor, teacher and columnist, Willie Orr was born in Ireland but now lives in Scotland.
Willie has published several non-fiction books, Deer Forests, Landlords and Crofters, Discovering Argyll, Mull and Iona, ‘The Highland Sporting Estate’ in Farming and the Land.
His regular column in The Scotsman ran from October 1990 to August 1994 entitled, The Rural Voltaire.
He has had several short stories published with Harper Collins, Splinters and Northwords, and has had two plays performed.
Willie was awarded the Scottish Arts Council Writer’s Bursary in 1988 and the Scottish Book Trust Mentoring Award in 2010.
In 2019 he published The Shepherd and the Morning Star, a remarkable autobiography, and biography of his father.
Mick Crossan is a ‘homer’, removed by social services from his widowed mother and slum home in the Gorbals and placed in ‘care’.
In 1950s Scotland, thousands of children were removed from their families for a ‘better life’ in the rural idyll of the Highlands as ‘boarded-out’ children.
Willie Orr deftly writes with a lightness of touch, and addresses a rarely talked about aspect of recent history.