Kathleen Jamie

Kathleen Jamie on Cairn

This June, we're thrilled to be welcoming Scotland's Makar, eminent poet and nature writer Kathleen Jamie, who joins us for her latest exquisitely crafted essay collection, Cairn.

Following Findings, Sightlines, and Surfacing, Cairn marks a long-anticipated addition to Kathleen's non-fiction repertoire.

Cairn: A marker on open land, a memorial, a viewpoint shared by strangers. For the last five years poet and author Kathleen Jamie has been turning her attention to a new form of writing: micro-essays, prose poems, notes and fragments. Placed together, like the stones of a wayside cairn, they mark a changing psychic and physical landscape.

The virtuosity of these short pieces is both subtle and deceptive. Jamie's intent 'noticing' of the natural world is suffused with a clear-eyed awareness of all we endanger. She considers the future her children face, while recalling her own childhood and notes the lost innocence in the way we respond to the dramas of nature. With meticulous care she marks the point she has reached, in life and within the cascading crises of our times. Cairn resonates with a beauty and wisdom that only an artist of Jamie's calibre could achieve.

Kathleen Jamie is one of Britain's foremost poets and essayists. In 2021 she was appointed Scotland's Makar (National Poet). Her groundbreaking works of non-fiction - Findings (2005), Sightlines (2012) and Surfacing (2019) - are considered pioneers and exemplars of 'new nature writing'. She lives in Fife.