Kathleen Jamie – Year of election 2009

Kathleen Jamie’s first book, Black Spiders, was published in 1982, when she was just 20, and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Since then she has been garlanded with prizes for her poetry, The Queen of Sheba (1994) winning the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and Treehouse (2004) the Forward Poetry Prize. She has also won a reputation for her singular prose, such as her travel book on Pakistan, The Golden Peak (1992), revised as Among Muslims (2002), and, notably, for her undefinable 2005 book, Findings, which was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. Richard Mabey described the book as “as close as writing gets to a conversation with the natural world”, while Andrew Marr compared her to Gilbert White.

“At various stages,” says Kathleen Jamie, “I’ve been called a ‘Scottish writer’ and a ‘woman writer’ and a ‘nature writer’ and a ‘travel writer’ – all of these apply and none of them. You never know where it’s going to come from next. All you can do is keep listening.”