Kathleen Jamie, one of the UK's foremost poets, is the author of four books of poetry and three nonfiction titles, including Sightlines. Her many awards and honors include the 2017 Royal Geographic Society Ness Award, conferred upon Jamie "for outstanding creative writing at the confluence of travel, nature and culture"; the 2013 Costa Book Award; as well as numerous prestigious poetry awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award, Forward Poetry Prize of the Year, and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award (twice). A professor of creative writing at the University of Stirling, she lives with her family in Fife, Scotland.
Shortlisted for the 2020 Highland Book Prize
“[Kathleen Jamie’s] essays guide you softly along coastlines of
varying continents, exploring caves, and pondering ice ages until
the narrator stumbles over — not a rock on the trail, but
mortality, maybe the earth’s, maybe our own, pointing to new paths
forward through the forest.” —Delia Owens, author of Where the
Crawdads Sing, “By the Book” in the New York Times Book
Review.
“Splendid… Jamie’s crisp language places you in a near-meditative
state.” —Monica Drake, The New York Times Book Review
“Jamie connects the relics of distant ages with the daily routines
in front of her…. Jamie appears more gregarious than Thoreau and
most other nature writers. While the genre is deeply populated by
solitaries, her essays brim with people.” —Danny Heitman, Wall
Street Journal
"Throughout it all, the reader encounters passages of breathtaking
beauty [...] though Jamie always finds herself relentlessly tugged
away from primordial beauty toward anxieties of the modern world
and a looming sense of catastrophe, the immediacy of her
surroundings giving way to a geologic sense of time." —Ernest
Hilbert, The Washington Post
“Like her previous works, Surfacing is rich in connections and
observations that grant the reader new ways of seeing …. Jamie
excavates long-forgotten memories in some, and then writes of two
very different digs in northern lands that are as stark and
beautiful as any nature writing but also witty and well-peopled –
qualities less typical of the genre.” —Patrick Barkham, The
Guardian
"Kathleen Jamie's stories of what the earth revels as our
coastlines erode pose a profoundly important question: what is it
that our civilization has lost sight of and might the artifacts
uncovered there help us to heal our relationships with each other
and the more-than-human world? To read Surfacing is to
travel in the company of a curious and dear friend, equally attuned
to the hawk on the horizon as she is to the ground beneath her
feet." —Elizabeth Rush, author of Rising: Dispatches from the
New American Shore
"In Surfacing, Kathleen Jamie—one of Scotland’s leading poets
and an exquisite prose writer—tracks travel observations and
reflects on the passage of time. The book is stoked with her
precise, often arresting language. [...] It is Jamie’s keen
and quiet power of observation and her affection for the big story
of the human species that seem to me the most bracing tonic for our
contentious times." —Alison Hawthorne Deming, Science
Magazine
"In Surfacing there is a poet’s economy with words, a
stripped clarity… she shows throughout this astonishing work,
it is in looking — attuning ourselves to nature and culture, past
and present — that we find our compass." —Barbra
Kiser, Nature Magazine
"Surfacing is a great companion for autumn’s natural
melancholy and meditative feel. Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie weaves
together lucid essays about aging, archaeology, travel, and the
erosion of natural resources and sacred wild places. She captures
that end-of-summer sadness, when you’re taking stock of your year
and slowing down as the days get shorter. The book is about
changing landscapes and human impact, but it’s also about memory
and paying attention, as she visits Ice Age caves and rides on
high-speed trains. It’s a series of tight visual scenes,
beautifully told, and it’s worth blocking out an afternoon to spend
time with." —Outside
“Jamie’s writing has a deceptive simplicity: its powers are
cumulative. Her way is to build impressionistic detail by
recounting conversations, travels, observations of the natural
world, and then carefully layer it in. It is its own kind of
archaeology. Every now and then, however, she cuts through the
assemblage of beautiful prose with a stinging comment: a reminder
that the natural balance is out of whack, or that violence and
menace can surface just as easily as venerable artefacts from the
past.” —Marina Benjamin, author of Insomnia, in the New
Statesman
"In a lyrical, beautifully rendered collection of essays, poet
Jamie (Sightlines) meditates on the natural world, lost cultures,
and the passage of time….Jamie’s observations about time and the
interconnectedness of human lives, past and present, are
insightful, and her language elegant. The result is a stirring
collection for poetry and prose readers alike.” —Publishers
Weekly
"Surfacing is a book whose impact is accretive and,
eventually, astonishing … It’s wonderful writing, testing the
limits of nonfiction." —Alex Preston, The Guardian
"This is a beautiful book, and a wise one. It invites feeling and
thought." —The Scotsman
"With language so thrilling it makes all other writing feel insipid
for a while…Jamie’s powers of observation have not flagged. She
continues to conjure up heart stopping images…It is the little
details Jamie picks up on that makes these essays so
touching.” —The Big Issue
Praise for Kathleen Jamie:
“A sorceress of the essay form. Never exotic, down to earth, she
renders the indefinable to the reader’s ear. Hold her tangible
words and they’ll take you places.” —John Berger, author
of Ways of Seeing and About Looking
“The leading Scottish poet of her generation.” —The Sunday Times
(London)
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