Kathleen Jamie is a poet, essayist and editor. Raised in Currie, near Edinburgh, she studied philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, publishing her first poems as an undergraduate. Her writing is rooted in Scottish landscape and culture, and ranges through travel, women’s issues, archaeology and visual art. She writes in English and occasionally in Scots.
Jamie’s collections include Black Spiders (1982) and The Queen of Sheba (1995). Her 2004 collection The Tree House revealed an increasing interest in the natural world, and won the Forward Poetry Prize and the Scottish Book of the Year Award. The Overhaul, won the 2012 Costa poetry award. In 2014, Jamie set herself the task of writing one poem per week. The resulting poems were collected in The Bonniest Companie, winning 2016 Saltire Society Book of the Year award. Her Selected Poems were published in 2018.
The poem ‘Here Lies Our Land’ by Jamie is inscribed on the national monument at Bannockburn.
For the last decade Jamie has also written non-fiction. Her collections of essays Findings, Sightlines and Surfacing are widely regarded as influential works of nature and landscape writing. The latter was a co-winner of the Highland Book Prize in 2020. On publication in the United States, Sightlines won the John Burroughs Medal and the Orion Book Award. Jamie writes occasional essays and reviews for the London Review of Books and The Guardian.
As an editor, Jamie has edited the first collection of Scottish nature writing Antlers of Water (2020), a selection of George Mackay Brown’s poetry Carve the Runes (2021) and, with Don Paterson and Peter Mackay, she has edited a new Golden Treasury of Scottish Verse (September 2021).
Until recently Jamie was Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Stirling. In August 2021, Jamie was appointed the Makar or National Poet for Scotland for a three year term.
Publishers : Picador (poetry), Sort Of Books (prose), Canongate (Antlers of Water & Golden Treasury of Scottish Verse)
Agent : Jenny Brown Associates
2021
