A year after his death, the socialist writer and pacifist Adrian Mitchell, often erroneously described as a “Liverpool poet” and, to the chagrin of his admirers labelled a mere “performance poet”, has now been claimed for Scotland, in a new book published in his honour.

Entitled Adrian — Scotland Celebrates Adrian Mitchell, the book will be published next month at the Scottish Poetry Liberty in Edinburgh, and will feature works by many of Mitchell’s Scottish friends, including Edwin Morgan, Liz Lochhead, W. N. Herbert, Jackie Kay and Carol Ann Duffy, the Poet Laureate. The book also features verse by admirers including Pete Brown, the former lyricist with the rock band Cream, and Sir Paul McCartney, both friends of the poet from the 1960s.

Born in Hampstead, North London, Mitchell described himself as “a mixed lefty, a socialist-anarchist-pacifist-Blakeist-revolutionary”. His father, Jock, from Cupar in Fife, was a captain in the 9th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders who survived the First World War, while Kathleen, his mother, was a member of the Fabian Society, who lost two brothers in the trenches. His parents’ political beliefs and Jock’s Scottish background were important to the poet, said his wife, Celia Hewitt, and in recent years Mitchell had been researching his roots in north Fife.

“He was always fond of Scotland and keen on his Scottish connections,” said Ms Hewitt. “He was great friends of Edwin Morgan and Liz Lochhead, and got on with them politically too.”

This sense of connection came though in Red Sky at Night, an anthology of British Socialist poetry that Mitchell co-edited in 2003. Its early poems feature prominently the works of William Blake, but later selections are laced with Scottish authors – many of whom return the compliment by contributing poems to the new anthology, which is edited by Chrys Salt and John Hudson.

Lochhead’s poem, Lavender’s Blue reflects on the shock of Mitchell’s sudden death in December last year: “ ... 2009, and you´d have none of it./ Three months and this whole bloody / turning world / has piled new atrocities and lies on old / Gaza happened / without you to sing the song / of simple THIS IS WRONG.”

Sir Paul — whose own Scottish connection extends to his farm on the Mull of Kintyre — contributes a poem, and a memory of Mitchell, who helped the former Beatle publish his own book of verse. “I was taken by the twinkle in his eye,” writes Sir Paul. “In my mind, his sense of humour, great talent with words and rock’n’roll spirit will live on forever.”

After graduating from Christ Church College, Oxford, Mitchell worked as a reporter for the Evening Standard and for The Sunday Times. In the early Sixties he quit journalism, wrote a television play and a novel, and began to make his name as a poet, emerging at the same time as Brian Patten, the Liverpool poet, a lifelong friend with whom he was often associated.

Mitchell discovered a rare ability to bring his work to life at readings. His sense of theatricality was famously captured on film, when he read To Whom it May Concern, his stirring anti-Vietnam poem, at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965, and he is pictured striding away through a rapturous audience of 7,500 after his final rhetorical flourish: “So scrub my skin with women / Chain my tongue with whisky / Stuff my nose with garlic / Coat my eyes with butter / Fill my ears with silver / Stick my legs in plaster /Tell me lies about Vietnam.”

“He was so nervous before that show,” said Ms Hewitt, an actress, who had been unable to attend the reading because she was on stage at Stratford East. “He had been to buy himself a blue suit from Carnaby Street, which he wore. But nobody expected so many people to turn up and the steps of the Royal Albert Hall were strewn with flowers. I arrived late and saw Alan Sillitoe coming out. I said: ‘Was he any good?’ Alan told me: ‘He was the star.’”

Ms Hewitt was the inspiration of one of her husband’s best-loved poems, entitled Celia Celia, which reads: “When I am sad and weary, / When I think all hope has gone, / When I walk along High Holborn / I think of you with nothing on.”

Ms Hewitt said she was torn between attending the book being introduced in Edinburgh, and an anti-war demonstration which is being held in London, that her husband would have attended. “This is the kind of dilemma he has left me with,” she said.

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