A miner, poet and playwright articulating the voices of early 20th century working-class experiences, Joe Corrie was born in Slammanan but grew up around and worked in the pits of Cardenden in Fife. His experiences here, both in labour and in protest, were to prove formative for the artistic endeavours of his later life. He was and remains most well-known for his dramatic work, enjoying comparisons to Zola and Sean O’Casey from some contemporaries, and suffering rejection on political and stylistic grounds from others. His poetry, while somewhat neglected in comparison, merits exploration, and in spite of obvious political differences T.S. Eliot was moved to declare Corrie ‘the greatest Scots poet since Burns’.
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