Kathleen Jamie

Kathleen Jamie

Born in the west of Scotland, Kathleen Jamie studied philosophy at Edinburgh University. At 19 she won the prestigious Eric Gregory Award, which enabled her to explore the Himalayas, and at 20 she published her first poetry collection, Black Spiders (1982). Jamie resists being identified solely as a Scottish poet, a woman writer, or a nature poet. Instead, she aims for her poetry to “provide a sort of connective tissue,” as she notes in a 2005 interview. As writer Tess Taylor observed in the Boston Review, in Jamie’s poetry “the simile is a form of repair.” Influenced by Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, John Clare, and Annie Dillard, Jamie writes musical poems that attend to the intersection of landscape, history, gender, and language. Jamie often engages Scots speech in her poetry, enjoying the “feel of it and the texture of it in the mouth,” as she explains in an interview with The Guardian.

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