Kathleen Jamie

Kathleen Jamie is a Scottish writer of poetry, essays, radio plays, and travel and nature writing. Her first poetry collection, Black Spiders, was published in 1981 while she was still an undergraduate, and led to Jamie winning an Eric Gregory Award. On her writer's website, Jamie recasts Stevenson's capitulative phrase, writing of her work and style as possessing ‘a strong Scots accent of the mind’. This ‘accent of the mind’ is at once ‘vocal and verbal’, political and historical, place‐specific, synthetic and healthily contrarian. Awarded an Eric Gregory Award in 1981 for Black Spiders, Jamie used the prize money to travel. Travelling alone, a woman, meant that Jamie also moved in a privileged position in the dominantly Shia Muslim communities in which she stayed–she had access to the female aspects of the culture often closed off to travellers.