Kathleen Jamie

POEMS BIBLIOGRAPHY CRITICISM LEARNING RESOURCES

Kathleen Jamie is a poet, essayist and editor.

In August 2021, Jamie was appointed the Makar or National Poet for Scotland for a three year term. In this role, Jamie has curated collective poems from lines submitted by the people of Scotland.

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 decadeJamie 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.

Publishers : Picador (poetry), Sort Of Books (prose), Canongate (Antlers of Water & Golden Treasury of Scottish Verse)

Agent : Jenny Brown Associates

2021

Selected Bibliography

Black spiders (Edinburgh: The Salamander Press, 1982)

A flame in your heart, with Andrew Greig (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1987)

The way we live (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1987)

The autonomous region: poems and photographs from Tibet, with Sean Mayne Smith (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1993)

The Queen of Sheba (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1994)

Jizzen (London: Picador, 1999)

Mr and Mrs Scotland are dead: poems 1980-1994, selected by Lilias Fraser (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 2002)

The tree house (London: Picador, 2004)

Waterlight: selected poems (Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2007)

The Overhaul (London: Picador, 2012)

The bonniest companie (London: Picador, 2015)

Other ways to leave a room by Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson and Nick Laird (Penguin, 2017)

Selected poems (Picador, 2018)

Antlers of water: writing on the nature and environment of Scotland, edited by Kathleen Jamie (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2020)

Selected Biography & Criticism

‘Kathleen Jamie’ in Gillean Somerville-Arjat and Rebecca E. Wilson (eds), Sleeping with Monsters: conversations with Scottish and Irish women poets (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990)

Raymond Friel, ‘Women beware gravity: Kathleen Jamie’s poetry’, Southfields Vol. 1, 1995

Dorothy McMillan, ‘Twentieth-century poetry II: the last twenty-five years’ in Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan (eds), A History of Scottish Women’s Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997

Helen Boden, ‘Kathleen Jamie’s semiotic of Scotlands’ in Aileen Christianson and Alison Lumsden (eds), Contemporary Scottish Women Writers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000)

Kathleen Jamie, interviewed by Lilias Fraser, Scottish Studies Review Vol. 2, no. 1, (Spring 2001)

Christopher Whyte, ‘The 1990s’ in Modern Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004)

Kirsty Scott, ‘In the nature of things: Kathleen Jamie’, The Guardian (18 June 2005)

Roderick Watson, ‘Kathleen Jamie’ in The Literature of Scotland: the twentieth century, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

Louisa Gairn, ‘Clearing space: Kathleen Jamie and ecology’ in Berthold Schoene (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007)

Attila Dósa, ‘Kathleen Jamie’ in Beyond Identity: new horizons in modern Scottish poetry (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2009)

Matt McGuire, ‘Kathleen Jamie’ in Matt McGuire and Colin Nicholson (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009)

Rachel Falconer, editor, Kathleen Jamie: essays and poems on her work (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015)