The desk and chair on which Edwin Morgan, Scotland's poet laureate, wrote his many verses, as well as an extensive selection of his personal archives, are now to be owned by the nation.

The Edwin Morgan Archive, collected by the poet's friend, publisher and bibliographer Hamish Whyte over more than 30 years, has been acquired by the Scottish Poetry Library with the aid of a £50,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

The purchase, the library said, "represents the most significant gathering of Morgan's work in print and other media, and gives an incomparable sense of the breadth of his work, its variety and especially its context".

Edwin Morgan was appointed Scots Makar, the role of national poet, by the Scottish Parliament in 2004.

Currently battling cancer, the 88-year-old Glaswegian poet is widely regarded as one of the nation's greatest living writers.

As well as books by Morgan, the archive includes periodicals, magazines and newspapers with contributions by Morgan, often annotated and corrected in his own hand, some audio-visual material, poster poems, books from Morgan's own library.

Architects have been commissioned to convert part of the Scottish Poetry Library, in Edinburgh, to house the archive.

Morgan, made an OBE in 1982, was born in Glasgow, and has never lived outside the city. In 2000 he won the Queen's Gold Medal and in 2001 the Weidenfeld Prize for Translation for Jean Racine: Phaedra.

He became Glasgow's first poet laureate in 1999.