Margaret Gillies Brown was born near Edinburgh and lives in Perthshire on the family farm in the Carse of Gowrie, which her sons now work. She trained as a nurse, had seven children, and began to publish poetry after her youngest went to school. The family emigrated to Canada for a few years, and she has described this experience in two non-fiction books.  She has published eight collections, among them Of Rowan and Pearl: poems of rural Scotland, with Kenneth Steven (Argyll, 2000) and The Sang o the Mavis (Diehard, 2008).