Kathleen Jamie – författare

A Scotsman Poetry Book of the YearShortlisted for Scottish Poetry Book of the Year'Jamie’s poetry offers a new way of seeing the world and a new form of intelligence about ourselves and other species' – Kit Fan, GuardianThe Keelie Hawk is a landmark poetry collection from Kathleen Jamie, the former Makar (National Poet) of Scotland. For the first time, Kathleen Jamie has brought her astonishing lyric talent to the language of her homeland, with outstanding results. The Keelie Hawk is a deeply resonant collection written in Scots, with each poem accompanied by a translation into English.Its publication is a significant event in Scottish literature, not only a reclaiming by one of our finest poets of the mouth-music of literary Scots, but a furthering of that language: ‘by making poems, a language develops’, Jamie observes in a fascinating afterword.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 SALTIRE AWARDIn keeping with the concept of Cairn the 2025 reprint contains an added 'stone' - the much loved poem What the Clyde said after Cop 26'This marvel of a book is a profound meditation on the precariousness of the planet ... these pieces kept bringing tears to my eyes, catching me offguard ... it is what art or, in this case, wonderful writing can do'Kate Kellaway, ObserverCairn: A marker on open land, a memorial, a viewpoint shared by strangers.For the last five years poet and author Kathleen Jamie has been turning her attention to a new form of writing: micro-essays, prose poems, notes and fragments. Placed together, like the stones of a wayside cairn, they mark a changing psychic and physical landscape. The virtuosity of these short pieces is both subtle and deceptive. Jamie's intent 'noticing' of the natural world is suffused with a clear-eyed awareness of all we endanger. She considers the future her children face, while recalling her own childhood and notes the lost innocence in the way we respond to the dramas of nature. With meticulous care she marks the point she has reached, in life and within the cascading crises of our times.Cairn resonates with a beauty and wisdom that only an artist of Jamie's calibre could achieve.

Other Ways to Leave the Room features the work of three of the most beloved and lauded poets currently at large. Between them, Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson and Nick Laird write lyrical, luminous and often darkly witty poems about the rugged wildness of the Scottish landscape; about fatherhood; about whisky-drinking, alcohol abuse and tenement life; about sex, love and the pursuit of the spiritual; about childhood in the Ireland of the Troubles, and about the strange possibilities of the technological future. What all three have in common is an ability to combine observations of gritty real life with a sense of the mythical proportions always lurking just under the surface of the everyday.The Penguin Modern Poets are succinct guides to the richness and diversity of contemporary poetry. Every volume brings together representative selections from the work of three poets now writing, allowing the curious reader and the seasoned lover of poetry to encounter the most exciting voices of our moment.

Other Ways to Leave the Room features the work of three of the most beloved and lauded poets currently at large. Between them, Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson and Nick Laird write lyrical, luminous and often darkly witty poems about the rugged wildness of the Scottish landscape; about fatherhood; about whisky-drinking, alcohol abuse and tenement life; about sex, love and the pursuit of the spiritual; about childhood in the Ireland of the Troubles, and about the strange possibilities of the technological future. What all three have in common is an ability to combine observations of gritty real life with a sense of the mythical proportions always lurking just under the surface of the everyday.The Penguin Modern Poets are succinct guides to the richness and diversity of contemporary poetry. Every volume brings together representative selections from the work of three poets now writing, allowing the curious reader and the seasoned lover of poetry to encounter the most exciting voices of our moment.

For several years now, Kathleen Jamie's work has addressed two principal concerns: how we negotiate with the natural world, and how we should define our conduct within family and society. In The Tree House Jamie argues - as Burns did before her - for an engagement of the whole being through a kind of practical earthly spirituality. These often startling encounters with animals, birds, and other humans propose a way of living which recognises the earth as home to many different consciousnesses -- and a means of authentic engagement with ‘this, the only world’. Together they form one of the most powerful poetic statements of recent years.

It's surprising what you can find by simply stepping out to look. Award-winning poet Kathleen Jamie has an eye and an ease with the nature and landscapes of Scotland as well as an incisive sense of our domestic realities. In Findings she draws together these themes to describe travels like no other contemporary writer.Whether she is following the call of a peregrine in the hills above her home in Fife, sailing into a dark winter solstice on the Orkney islands, or pacing around the carcass of a whale on a rain-swept Hebridean beach, she creates a subtle and modern narrative, peculiarly alive to her connections and surroundings.

The outer world flew open like a door, and I wondered - what is it that we're just not seeing?In this greatly anticipated sequel to Findings, prize-winning poet and renowned nature writer Kathleen Jamie takes a fresh look at her native Scottish landscapes, before sailing north into iceberg-strewn seas. Her gaze swoops vertiginously too; from a countryside of cells beneath a hospital microscope, to killer whales rounding a headland, to the constellations of satellites that belie our sense of the remote. Written with her hallmark precision and delicacy, and marked by moments in her own life, Sightlines offers a rare invitation to pause and to pay heed to our surroundings.

The Overhaul is Kathleen Jamie’s first collection since the award-winning The Tree House, and it broadens her poetic range considerably. The Overhaul continues Jamie’s lyric enquiry into the aspects of the world our rushing lives elide, and even threaten. Whether she is addressing birds or rivers, or the need to accept loss, or sometimes, the desire to escape our own lives, her work is earthy and rigorous, her language at once elemental and tender.As an essayist, she has frequently queried our human presence in the world with the question ‘How are we to live?’ Here, this is answered more personally than ever. The Overhaul is a mid-life book of repair, restitution, and ultimately hope – of the wisest and most worldly kind.

These poems unfold with a supernatural intensity, alternately dark and celebratory, that set them apart from other treatments of the subject. Through the perspectives of emigrant and native, critic and intimate, Jamie addresses Scotland in all its living complexity.Jizzen reveals a writer coming into poetic maturity just as her nation begins to fully assume its own identity. The result is a poetry both worldly and other-worldly, remarkable it its humanity, political sophistication and lyric authority.‘With The Queen of Sheba Kathleen Jamie has produced the best individual collection of poems by a woman living in twentieth-century Scotland. The book establishes her eminence among Scottish poets of her generation . . . The precision and resource of her language have never been combined more impressively than here’ Robert Crawford, Scotsman

The Overhaul is Kathleen Jamie’s first collection since the award-winning The Tree House, and it broadens her poetic range considerably. The Overhaul continues Jamie’s lyric enquiry into the aspects of the world our rushing lives elide, and even threaten. Whether she is addressing birds or rivers, or the need to accept loss, or sometimes, the desire to escape our own lives, her work is earthy and rigorous, her language at once elemental and tender.As an essayist, she has frequently queried our human presence in the world with the question ‘How are we to live?’ Here, this is answered more personally than ever. The Overhaul is a mid-life book of repair, restitution, and ultimately hope – of the wisest and most worldly kind.

In her extraordinary collection, Kathleen Jamie examines her native Scotland - a country at once wild and contained, rural and urban - and her place within it. In the author's own words: '2014 was a year of tremendous energy in my native Scotland, and knowing I wanted to embrace that energy and participate in my own way, I resolved to write a poem a week, and follow the cycle of the year.' The poems also venture into childhood and family memory - and look to ahead to the future. The Bonniest Companie is a visionary response to a year shaped and charged by both local and global forces, and will stand as a remarkable document of our times.

In her extraordinary collection, Kathleen Jamie examines her native Scotland - a country at once wild and contained, rural and urban - and her place within it. In the author's own words: '2014 was a year of tremendous energy in my native Scotland, and knowing I wanted to embrace that energy and participate in my own way, I resolved to write a poem a week, and follow the cycle of the year.' The poems also venture into childhood and family memory - and look to ahead to the future. The Bonniest Companie is a visionary response to a year shaped and charged by both local and global forces, and will stand as a remarkable document of our times.

Kathleen Jamie’s Selected Poems gathers together some of the finest work by one of the foremost poets currently writing in English. Although Jamie is perhaps best known for her writing on nature, landscape, and place, Selected Poems shows the full and remarkably diverse range of her work – and why many regard her work as crucially relevant to our troubled age. No poet currently writing has a keener eye or ear; no poet has paid more careful attention to the other consciousnesses with whom we share the planet – and no poet has Jamie’s almost miraculous ability to show us just how the world might look when the human eye ceases to gaze on it. This exceptional collection of poetry, spanning several decades, allows readers to chart the development of one of our most important contemporary talents, and serves as perfect introduction to her work.

Kathleen Jamie’s Selected Poems gathers together some of the finest work by one of the foremost poets currently writing in English. Although Jamie is perhaps best known for her writing on nature, landscape, and place, Selected Poems shows the full and remarkably diverse range of her work – and why many regard her work as crucially relevant to our troubled age. No poet currently writing has a keener eye or ear; no poet has paid more careful attention to the other consciousnesses with whom we share the planet – and no poet has Jamie’s almost miraculous ability to show us just how the world might look when the human eye ceases to gaze on it. This exceptional collection of poetry, spanning several decades, allows readers to chart the development of one of our most important contemporary talents, and serves as perfect introduction to her work.

A Scotsman Poetry Book of the YearShortlisted for Scottish Poetry Book of the Year'Jamie’s poetry offers a new way of seeing the world and a new form of intelligence about ourselves and other species' – Kit Fan, GuardianThe Keelie Hawk is a landmark poetry collection from Kathleen Jamie, the former Makar (National Poet) of Scotland. For the first time, Kathleen Jamie has brought her astonishing lyric talent to the language of her homeland, with outstanding results. The Keelie Hawk is a deeply resonant collection written in Scots, with each poem accompanied by a translation into English.Its publication is a significant event in Scottish literature, not only a reclaiming by one of our finest poets of the mouth-music of literary Scots, but a furthering of that language: ‘by making poems, a language develops’, Jamie observes in a fascinating afterword.

“Scotland” is another essential issue from Irish Pages, the island’s leading literary journal. The issue is a cultural state-of-the-union for Scotland in the aftermath of the 2014 Referendum, with some incisive politics and a section of poems by Scotland’s leading and emerging poets. The Guest Editors are Kathleen Jamie, Scotland’s Makar or national poet laureate, and Don Paterson, celebrated Scottish poet and former Poetry Editor at Picador Books. This issue is sure to sell quite hugely in Scotland.

Kathleen Jamie is one of Britain''s leading poets. Her work is intelligent and subtle, her language inventive and refreshing. Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead is a selection from her early collections, from times of change and travel. It reveals the generous range of her concerns, from life in the wilder parts of Pakistan and Tibet to the ''difficult questions'' of identity posed in her much celebrated collection, The Queen of Sheba, which was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead is a seminal volume in modern Scottish poetry. Shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, it was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. It includes most of her poems from Black Spiders (1982), A Flame in Your Heart (1986), The Way We Live (1987), The Autonomous Region (1993) and The Queen of Sheba (1994). ''Genius is no stranger to the work of Kathleen Jamie. With each successive theme to which Jamie turns her vision she brings the gift of insight and mystery…poetry of stunning clarity and musicality'' -Scotsman. ''With The Queen of Sheba Kathleen Jamie has produced the best individual collection of poems by a woman living in 20th century Scotland. The book establishes her eminence among Scottish poets of her generation. The precision and resource of her language have never been combined more impressively than here'' -Robert Crawford. ''A deep lyricism married to intelligent and highly disciplined verse'' -Scotland on Sunday.

'Luminous' The Times'Beautiful' Caught by the RiverBringing together contemporary Scottish writing on nature and landscape, this inspiring collection takes us from walking to wild swimming, from red deer to pigeons and wasps, from remote islands to back gardens, through prose, poetry and photography.Edited and introduced by Kathleen Jamie, and with contributions from Amy Liptrot, Jim Crumley, Chitra Ramaswamy, Malachy Tallack, Amanda Thomson and many more, Antlers of Water urges us to renegotiate our relationship with the more-than-human world, in writing which is by turns celebratory, radical and political.

The Golden Treasury of Scottish Verse is a timeless collection of Scottish poetry. It contains over three hundred poems ranging from the early medieval period to the twenty-first century, and paints a full-colour portrait of Scotland's poetic heritage and culture.Edited and introduced by award-winning poets Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson and Peter Mackay, and including poems by Robert Burns, Carol Ann Duffy, Sorley MacLean, Violet Jacob, William Dunbar, Meg Bateman, George Mackay Brown, Màiri Mhòr nan Òran, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jackie Kay, Liz Lochhead and many more, The Golden Treasury of Scottish Verse is a joyous celebration of Scotland's literary past, present and future.

Archipelago is one of the most important and influential literary magazines of the lasttwenty years. Running to twelve editions, it was edited by Andrew McNeillie, with theassistance later of James McDonald Lockhart, and began as an attempt to reimagine therelationships between the islands of Ireland and Britain. Archipelago has brought togetherestablished and emerging artists in creative conversations that have transformed the studyof islands, coasts and waterways. It journeys from the Shetlands to Cornwall, from theAran Islands to the coast of Yorkshire, tracing the cultures of diverse zones through someof the best in contemporary writing about place and people.This collection gathers poetry, prose and visual art in clusters grouped around the Irishand British archipelago, with contributions from an array of significant artists. It includesnewly commissioned work as well as an interview between Andrew McNeillie andRobert Macfarlane on the development of Archipelago across the years.

Experience a new history of Scotland told through its places. Writers Kathleen Jamie, Alexander McCall Smith, Alistair Moffat, James Robertson and James Crawford pick twenty-five buildings to tell the story of the nation.Travelling across the country, from abandoned islands and lonely glens to the heart of our modern cities, these five authors seek out the diverse narrative of the Scottish people. Follow Kathleen Jamie as she searches for the traces of our first family hearths in the Cairngorms and makes a midsummer journey to Shetland to meet the unlikely new inhabitants of an Iron Age broch. Tour the wondrous and macabre Surgeons’ Hall with Alexander McCall Smith, or walk with him over sacred ground to Iona’s ancient Abbey. Join Alistair Moffat as he discovers a lost whisky village in the wilds of Strathconon, and climbs up through the vertiginous layers of history in Edinburgh Castle. Accompany James Robertson as he goes from the standing stones of Callanish to the humble cottage of Hugh MacDiarmid – via the engineering colossus of the Forth Rail Bridge. And journey with James Crawford from a packed crowd in Hampden Park, to an off-the-grid eco-bothy on the Isle of Eigg.Who Built Scotland is a landmark exploration of Scotland’s social, political and cultural histories. Moving from Neolithic families, exiled hermits and ambitious royal dynasties to highland shieling girls, peasant poets, Enlightenment philosophers and iconoclastic artists, it places our people, our ideas and our passions at the heart of our architecture and archaeology. This is the remarkable story how we have shaped our buildings and how our buildings, in turn, have shaped us.

'What we build always reveals things that are deeply and innately human. Because all buildings are stories, one way or another.'Kathleen Jamie, Alexander McCall Smith, Alistair Moffat, James Robertson and James Crawford travel across the country to tell the story of the nation, from abandoned islands and lonely glens to the heart of our modern cities.Whether visiting Shetland’s Mousa Broch at midsummer, following in the footsteps of pilgrims to Iona Abbey, joining the tourist bustle at Edinburgh Castle, scaling the Forth Bridge or staying in an off-the-grid eco-bothy, the authors unravel the stories of the places, people and passions that have had an enduring impact on the landscape and character of Scotland.

Kathleen Jamie is one of Britain's leading poets. Her work is intelligent and subtle, her language inventive and refreshing. Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead is a selection from her early collections, from times of change and travel. It reveals the generous range of her concerns, from life in the wilder parts of Pakistan and Tibet to the 'difficult questions' of identity posed in her much celebrated collection, The Queen of Sheba, which was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead is a seminal volume in modern Scottish poetry. Shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, it was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. It includes most of her poems from Black Spiders (1982), A Flame in Your Heart (1986), The Way We Live (1987), The Autonomous Region (1993) and The Queen of Sheba (1994).

Collective Winner of the 2019 Highland Book PrizeUnder the ravishing light of an Alaskan sky, objects are spilling from the thawing tundra linking a Yup'ik village to its hunter-gatherer past. In the shifting sand dunes of a Scottish shoreline, impressively preserved hearths and homes of Neolithic farmers are uncovered. In a grandmother's disordered mind, memories surface of a long-ago mining accident and a 'mither who was kind'.For this luminous new essay collection, acclaimed author Kathleen Jamie visits archaeological sites and mines her own memories - of her grandparents, of youthful travels - to explore what surfaces and what reconnects us to our past. As always she looks to the natural world for her markers and guides. Most movingly, she considers, as her father dies, and her children leave home, the surfacing of an older, less tetheredsense of herself.Surfacing offers a profound sense of time passing and an antidote to all that is instant, ephemeral, unrooted.

When ten Pakistani men walk into Kathleen Jamie's small Scottish town on a peace march, in November 2001, she is thrown back to her own travels in Northern Pakistan and a book she wrote a decade earlier.Among Muslims is the account of Jamie's time travelling alone and living among the Shia and Ismaili Muslims in the Northern Areas - the mountainous regions wedged between Afghanistan, India and China and one of the most volatile borderlands in the world.A bold, sympathetic and superbly written book, Among Muslims delves into Jamie's own Scottish upbringing to find links with the purdah-observing lifestyle of her Shia Muslim hosts. It is a privileged account from an acclaimed poet, who during her travels was often literally the only woman on the bus.Among Muslims was originally published as The Golden Peak. For this edition, Kathleen Jamie returned to Pakistan to write an Afterword and Preface.