Alan Jamieson was born in 1958 in the crofting community of Sandness on Shetland. After publishing two novels and a collection of poetry, Shoormal, during the 1980s, he studied English Literature at the University of Edinburgh as a mature student, before taking up the William Soutar Fellowship in Perth (1993-96). He was Creative Writing Fellow at the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde, between 1998 and 2001. Since the 1990s Jamieson has been active in teaching creative writing at Edinburgh University, where he is now a Senior Lecturer.
He co-edited Edinburgh Review from 1993 until 1998, and has published five novels.
Jamieson’s interest in the translation of poetry, fostered by his involvement with the organisation Literature Across Frontiers, has resulted inwork on contemporary European poetry, and his own poetry has in turn been translated into a dozen European languages. His most recent publication collects his own poems with his translations into Shetlandic from other marginalised European languages. (A Hundir Inboos Till a Diein Lied: a poetic voyage through the (linguistic) margins of Europe, published by Luath in 2017.)
