Kathleen Jamie



Kathleen Jamie FRSL (born 13 May 1962) is a Scottish poet.

Life and work
Born in Renfrewshire, Jamie is the oldest of three children. Her father was an accountant and her mother worked for a solicitor's office. Jamie grew up in Currie, near Edinburgh and went to Currie High School. She studied philosophy at Edinburgh University and while there her first poems were published in the pamphlet Black Spiders by the independent publisher Tom Fenton (brother of poet James Fenton). It won an Eric Gregory Award and a Scottish Arts Council book award. The Council also gave her a small grant with which she was able to pursue her writing after university and travel, including an extended trip to the Himalayas.

She has held several writer-in-residence posts, including one at the University of Dundee from 1991 to 1993. Jamie's poetry collection Jizzen (1999) is named for the word for childbed after bearing her own children. It won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial prize and she began teaching at University of St. Andrews. In 2001 she was given a Creative Scotland Award. In 2004 she won the Forward Poetry Prize for poetry for The Tree House and the Scottish Book of the Year Award in 2005. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.

She now lives in Fife and now holds the chair in creative writing at Stirling University. The collection The Overhaul will be published in September 2012.

Awards

 * 1981  Eric Gregory Award
 * 1982  Scottish Arts Council Book Award   for Black Spiders
 * 1988  Scottish Arts Council Book Award for The Way We Live
 * 1995  Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize   (shortlist)  for The Queen of Sheba
 * 1995  Somerset Maugham Award for The Queen of Sheba
 * 1995  T. S. Eliot Prize   (shortlist)   for The Queen of Sheba
 * 1996  Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem) for  (The Graduates)
 * 1996  Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for The Queen of Sheba
 * 1999  T. S. Eliot Prize   (shortlist) for  Jizzen
 * 2000  Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year)   (shortlist)  for  Jizzen
 * 2000  Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for Jizzen
 * 2001  Scottish Arts Council Creative Scotland Award
 * 2003  Griffin Poetry Prize (Canada)   (shortlist)  for Mr. and Mrs. Scotland are Dead: Poems 1980-1994
 * 2004  Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) for The Tree House
 * 2004  T.S. Eliot Prize   (shortlist)  for The Tree House
 * 2005  Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award for The Tree House
 * 2006  Ondaatje Prize (shortlist) for  Findings
 * 2006  Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award (shortlist) for Findings

Publications

 * Black Spiders 1982
 * A Flame In Your Heart (with Andrew Greig) 1986
 * The Way We Live 1987
 * The Golden Peak: Travels in North Pakistan 1992 (reissued as Among Muslims in 2002)
 * The Autonomous Region: Poems and Photographs from Tibet 1993
 * The Queen of Sheba 1994
 * Jizzen 1999
 * Mr & Mrs Scotland Are Dead (Poems 1980-94) 2002 (shortlisted for the 2003 International Griffin Poetry Prize)
 * The Treehouse 2004
 * Findings 2005, essays
 * Sightlines 2012, essays
 * The Overhaul (September 2012)