Findings

KATHLEEN JAMIE

‘This is as close as writing gets to a conversation with the
natural world.’ Richard Mabey, author of Flora Britannica

Between the laundry and the fetching kids from school, that’s how birds enter my life. I listen. During a lull in the traffic: oyster-catchers; in the school-playground, sparrows.

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.

Award-winning poet, Kathleen Jamie was born in the west of Scotland in 1962. Her first travel book, Among Muslims (also published by Sort Of Books), was described as ‘utterly luminous’ (The Independent) and ‘one of the most powerful accounts by a contemporary Western writer’ (TLS).

Her latest poetry collection, The Tree House (Picador), won the 2004 Forward prize.

A part-time lecturer in Creative Writing at St Andrews University, Kathleen Jamie lives with her family in Fife.

‘Prose essays of a sharpness of looking, and directness of thought, that will make them last a long time; some of the best writing out of rural Scotland for many decades. Jamie observes the extraordinary, alien natural world around her with a frank uncluttered candour, while nevertheless standing rooted in the middle of modern family life.’
Andrew Marr, writer and broadcaster.

‘Kathleen Jamie is a supreme listener. Her attention – to the beckoning calls of the peregrines that nest near her house, to the brimful darkness in the neolithic chambers at Maes Howe, to the mute appeals of embryo skeletons in a medical museum – has a directness that borders on the heroic. And 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.’
Richard Mabey, author of Flora Britannica

From the moment you meet Kathleen Jamie's words, you meet a passion for the environment, not as an abstract quality but as what surrounds her...the small birds in the garden, the landscapes of her native Scotland, even ordinary familiar domestic cares are illuminated with curiosity, affection, knowledge and a deep concern.’
Rosalind Coward, writer and journalist.

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