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Ian Hamilton Finlay was born in Nassau, the Bahamas in 1925.
He returned to Glasgow in early childhood and (briefly) attended Glasgow School of Art.
He moved to London, did military service and then returned to Scotland where he worked as a shepherd. He published short stories and plays in the mid 1950s and moved to Edinburgh at the end of the 1950s. He founded the Wild Hawthorn Press, with Jesse McGuffe in 1961, initially publishing work by contemporary poets and artists and eventually exclusively by Finlay.
In 1964 he began to produce poems designed to be set in an environment and in 1966 moved to Stonypath with Sue Finlay and began to create the garden there. In 1978 he began “Five Year Hellenisation Plan” for Stonypath Garden , renamed “Little Sparta”.
Ian Hamilton Finlay has worked on permanent landscaped installations, with the collaboration of other contributors, in many parts of Europe and the USA and has exhibited world-wide since his first exhibition at the Axiom Gallery, London in 1968.
He has been awarded honorary Doctorates by the University of Aberdeen and Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize, Tate Gallery, London in 1985.
He has published numerous books and booklets, cards and folding cards, poems and prints and his work is documented in a number of exhibitions and monographs.
Further information can be found on the Little Sparta website click here