Authors > kathleen jamie
Kathleen Jamie is one of Britain’s foremost writers. In 2021 she was appointed makar, Scotland’s national poet. Her groundbreaking works of prose – Findings (2005), Sightlines (2012) and Surfacing (2019) – are considered the pioneers and exemplars of new nature writing. She lives in Fife.
Her first non-fiction, The Golden Peak; an account of her travels in rural Pakistan, was re-published by Sort of Books as Among Muslims in 2005. It was described as ‘utterly luminous’ (The Independent) and ‘one of the most powerful accounts by a contemporary Western writer’ (TLS). Her subsequent collection of prose essays, Findings (Sort of Books, 2006) is considered a landmark in nature writing. Richard Mabey wrote of it: ‘Kathleen Jamie is a supreme listener … in the quietness of her listening, you hear her own voice: clear, subtle, respectful, and so unquenchably curious that it makes the world anew. This is as close as writing gets to a conversation with the natural world.’
Sightlines, the highly anticipated sequel to Findings, (Sort Of Books, 2012) has been described as ‘a work of intense purity and quiet genius’ by the Sunday Telegraph, and ‘a lyrical work of profound insight’ by Kirkus Reviews. It won both the 2014 John Burroughs medal and Orion award on publication in the USA.
Surfacing, (Sort Of Books, 2019) completes the ‘Findings trilogy’. It was named Book of the Month by Waterstones and won the Highland Book Prize 2019.
Kathleen Jamie held the post of Professor of Creative Writing at Stirling University until 2020.
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Voice of the Wood
SO YOU’VE REALLY GONE AND DONE IT THIS TIME you are lost in the wood how did that happen? The crazed Scots pines camped all around and blaeberries beneath and bracken shrivelled because it’s October and you stand hearing nothing, the non-sound of one leaf dropping to join its siblings on the ground…
Kathleen Jamie, Chris Stewart and Tove Jansson (via her family estate) are to donate thousands of copies of their best loved titles to the Waterstones Syrian migrant crisis appeal.