Kathleen Jamie

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	Photo: © Claire McNamee

Biography

Kathleen Jamie was born in Renfrewshire, Scotland in 1962. She studied philosophy at Edinburgh University. She has published several collections of poetry, including: Black Spiders (1982)  The Way We Live (1987),  The Queen of Sheba (1994),  and Jizzen (1999). A travel book about Northern Pakistan, The Golden Peak (1993), was recently updated and reissued as Among Muslims (2002).

She has received several prestigious awards for her poetry, including a Somerset Maugham Award, a Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem), a Paul Hamlyn Award and a Creative Scotland Award.  She has twice also won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.  Her selected poems, Mr & Mrs Scotland Are Dead (2002), which contains much of her work written before 1994, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize.

As well as poetry, Kathleen Jamie writes for radio, especially travel-scripts, and specially commissioned long poems. She lives in Fife and in 1999 was appointed Lecturer in Creative Writing at St Andrews University. Her poetry collection, The Tree House (2004), won the 2004 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the 2005 Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award.

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Genres (in alphabetical order)

Non-fiction, Poetry

Bibliography

Black Spiders   Salamander Press, 1982

A Flame in Your Heart   (with Andrew Greig)   Bloodaxe, 1986

The Way We Live   Bloodaxe, 1987

The Golden Peak: Travels in North Pakistan   (reissued as 'Among Muslims', 2002)   Virago, 1992

The Autonomous Region: Poems and Photographs from Tibet   (with Sean Mayne Smith)   Bloodaxe, 1993

The Queen of Sheba   Bloodaxe, 1994

Full Strength Angels: New Writing Scotland, Vol 14   (edited with James McGonigal)   Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1996

Penguin Modern Poets, Book 9: John Burnside, Robert Crawford, Kathleen Jamie   Penguin, 1996

Some Sort of Embrace: New Writing Scotland, Vol 15   (edited with Donny O'Rourke and Rody Gormin)   Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1997

The Glory Signs: New Writing Scotland, Vol 16   (edited with Donny O'Rourke)   Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1998

Jizzen   Picador, 1999

Mr & Mrs Scotland Are Dead (Poems 1980-94)   Bloodaxe, 2002

The Tree House   Picador, 2004

Findings   Sort Of Books, 2005

Waterlight: selected poems   Graywolf Press, 2007

Read about books by Kathleen Jamie at encompassculture.com - the British Council's book database and global online book club

Buy books by Kathleen Jamie at Amazon.co.uk

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Prizes and awards

1981   Eric Gregory Award

1982   Scottish Arts Council Book Award   Black Spiders

1988   Scottish Arts Council Book Award   The Way We Live

1995   Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize   (shortlist)   The Queen of Sheba

1995   Somerset Maugham Award   The Queen of Sheba

1995   T. S. Eliot Prize   (shortlist)   The Queen of Sheba

1996   Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem)   ('The Graduates')

1996   Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize   The Queen of Sheba

1999   T. S. Eliot Prize   (shortlist)   Jizzen

2000   Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year)   (shortlist)   Jizzen

2000   Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize   Jizzen

2001   Scottish Arts Council Creative Scotland Award

2003   Griffin Poetry Prize (Canada)   (shortlist)   Mr. and Mrs. Scotland are Dead: Poems 1980-1994

2004   Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year)   The Tree House

2004   T. S. Eliot Prize   (shortlist)   The Tree House

2005   Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award   The Tree House

2006   Ondaatje Prize   (shortlist)   Findings

2006   Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award   (shortlist)   Findings

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Critical Perspective

'I have tried to be a "woman writer" and a "Scottish writer'', stated Kathleen Jamie in the 1994 'New Generation Poets' issue of Poetry Review, 'but grow irritated and feel confined'. These are the twin tensions that have energised her work, and she has thereby become one of the leading figures in the renaissance of Scottish poetry in recent years - alongside other poets of her generation such as Robert Crawford, Don Paterson, John Burnside, Jackie Kay and Roddy Lumsden. Her poems are sinuously rhythmic, lyrical but incisive, driven and restless, with many asides and transitions. While most of them are in English, the sounds of Scots speech informs her poems; and she uses Scots, as the critic Edna Longley has observed, as much for critique as for celebration, 'in ways that refresh its traditions'. And the matter of Scotland is a preoccupation throughout her work, notably in her most acclaimed book The Queen of Sheba (1994), up to a recent volume of selected poems ironically entitled Mr & Mrs Scotland Are Dead (2002).

An Eric Gregory Award at the age of nineteen enabled her to visit the Near East and the Himalayas, and exploration, whether geographical or personal, has turned out to be a significant part of her output as a writer. The Way We Live (1987) included 'Karakoram Highway', a set of poems written in Northern Pakistan. She went to Tibet in Spring 1989, travelling with the photographer Sean Mayne Smith, several months on the road in the company of nomads, pilgrims, monks and traders which resulted in their collaborative book The Autonomous Region (1993). This is no conventional travelogue in verse, and its subtext is Tibet's rule by China just before the clampdown following events of Tiananmen Square. Jamie's own reactions to the contemporary scene are juxtaposed with the 'ghost lines of energy and wanderings' she finds in following two characters, Fa-hsien, a Chinese monk of the fourth century ('jaunty as a fiddler / down the loch-side'), and Princess Wen Cheng, a sixth century Buddhist educator. In the most lyrical poem, 'The Panchen Lama rides from Lhasa to Kumbum'; 'The Plateau of Tibet / stretched away like an oil-dark painting /… So for a thousand miles: / till the sun coaxed the world to open like a daisy; / splashed gold on the roofs on the gold-rooved monastery… ' Jamie's prose travel books have been recently reissued in a new edition as Among Muslims (2002).

A crucial component of her work is the perspective on Scotland that foreign travels have given her; this means not merely 'A Dream of the Dalai Lama on Skye' but a critical view of its nationhood, a desire for cultural if not political autonomy. By her own account, she takes pride in the new Scottish Parliament, and for her ' ''Scottish" was a political word, more so than "woman"…  The politics (of devolution) are indistinguishable from my life'. Nevertheless, more recently there seems to be a move in her work from wider concerns to locality, and to experiences specific to her as a woman - notably in poems about the birth of her children. She could also equally well be regarded as a nature poet who has been sidetracked by 'issues'. Her work has a perennial eye upon the natural world, the animals, flora and fauna of wherever she happens to be. There's a great deal of walking to be done, observations of local landscapes, flowers and plants, fish and above all birds. These can be 'Swallows and Swifts' or 'Skeins o Geese': 'Whit dae birds write on the dusk? / A word niver spoken or read'.

Her publications began at the precocious age of twenty with the slim collection Black Spiders (1982). In it she already contrasts poems of Scottish scenes ('Crammond Island') to travel poems describing a determinedly non-exotic foreignness. Some of the latter poems prefigure later concerns with the Islamic world; 'Storm in Istanbul' contains 'the wail of a failing old imam' and the dangers facing 'Women in Jerusalem' force her to wear Arab clothes. Two other poems in the book 'November' and 'War Widow', incidentally later appeared in A Flame in Your Heart, (a 1986 collaboration with Andrew Grieg) telling of a girl's doomed wartime romance in 1940 with a spitfire pilot.

Jamie's dual manners of critique and celebration are evident throughout The Queen of Sheba, which she characterised as 'my Scottish book'. In this sense she is a public poet, addressing the nation in its title poem: 'Scotland, you have invoked her name / just once too often / in your Presbyterian living rooms'. The imagined arrival of Sheba, with 'her hairy legs and / bonny wicked smile' causes a stir, as she leads 'those great soft camels / widdershins round the kirk-yaird'. A much shorter poem, 'Arraheids', is equally playfully satirical of repressive elements in Scottish culture. A museum exhibit of arrowheads is seen as 'the hard tongues o' grannies', who 'cannae keep fae muttering / ye are nae here tae wonder, / whoe dae ye think ye ur?'. Other poems travel the world ('China for Lovers') but most are set in the contemporary scene of shopping malls, tenements, and even Edinburgh massage parlours ('Hand Relief'), or simply observe a mother taking photographs of her baby ('Child with pillar and bin bags'). 'Jocky in the Wilderness' addresses a man, representative of mass unemployment, lying drunk in a ditch: 'are ye no feart / they'll concrete over you redundant limbs?'. The anti-Conservative government political campaigns of the 1980s colour a number of poems, as in 'The Republic of Fife', where 'citizens' dangle over the motorway flyover to paint slogans. 'One of Us' describes mysterious incomers to Scotland, first in stone boats wearing sealskins, then taking swans' shape to cross the Minch, buying yellow Pringle sweaters, planning to hold 'minor government jobs, lay plans, and bide our time'.

Jizzen (an old Scots word for childbed) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1999. The prevailing subject in the book is birth, literally human and metaphorically political, in poems about her children being born and the new Scottish Parliament being re-born. Its most admired poems, 'Ultrasound', are a sequence about an unborn child, seen on a scan as 'a seer's mothy flicker, / an inner sprite'. 'Bairnsang' moves into Scots to make a lullaby to her 'wee toshie man', while 'The Tay Moses' invokes the Biblical story in a modern setting. However politics has not been cast aside entirely. In 'Crossing the Loch' there is a 'cold shawl of breeze' but the chill is in 'what the water held / of deadheads, ticking, nuclear hulls'. The poverty observed among 'Flower sellers, Budapest' counterpoints poems about the richness of Scottish flora and fauna, and 'Rhododendrons' brings 'Yunnan / or Himalayan earth / settled with them'. 'Meadowsweet' is a bravura end to her most mature collection, taking up the Gaelic tradition of female poets with whom Jamie is implicitly aligning herself. The women were buried face down, with seeds in their hair, to be imaginatively reborn: 'mouth young, and full again /, of dirt, and spit, and poetry'.

Dr Jules Smith, 2003

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Author statement

Statements make me anxious. They're such hostages to fortune: too hard and fast, too fundamentalist. My poetry would be a dead thing if it couldn't retain its liquidity, couldn't change shape or direction. However, two things have been constant over the years': a rigour, and a concern for musicality. I like to think that both come from two different Scottish traditions.

I couldn't even say what I write 'about', because I distrust the relationship expressed by the word 'about'. I'd rather say that I write 'toward'. Or perhaps 'within'. At the moment, I'm writing a lot 'toward' the natural world. In the past I've had to address 'issues' in my work, of gender and national and personal identity, just in order to clear space. 'Do you consider yourself a woman writer or a Scottish writer?' is a question I can no longer answer politely.

Just last week, in a tiny magazine, I read a description of my work which delighted me. It said 'Kathleen Jamie - somewhere between the Presbyterian and the Tao'.

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Contact information

Publisher (General enquiries) Picador Pan Macmillan Ltd 20 New Wharf Road London  N1 9RR England Tel: +44 (0) 20 7014 6000 Fax: +44 (0)20 7014 6001 http://www.panmacmillan.com

Agent Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd 20 Powis Mews London  W11 1JN England Tel: +44 (0)20 7221 3717 Fax: +44 (0)20 7229 9084 http://www.rcwlitagency.co.uk

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