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SCOTTISH POETRY LIBRARY – 29.10.25 – ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
KATHLEEN JAMIE & DON PATERSON IN CONVERSATION WITH CHRIS AGEE
Kathleen Jamie
Kathleen Jamie is a poet and essayist. Her poetry collections include The Overhaul, which won the 2012 Costa Poetry Prize, and The Tree House, which won the Forward Prize. The Bonniest Company won the 2015 Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award. Her non-fiction essays are collected in the three highly regarded books: Findings, Sightlines, and Surfacing, all regarded as important contributions to the “new nature writing”. In 2024 she published Cairn,“a view from the strange here-and-now”, and The Keelie Hawk, a collection of poems in Scots.
Between 2010 and 2020 Kathleen was Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Stirling, and from 2021–24 she served as Scotland’s Makar, or National Poet. Kathleen’s interests include archaeology, nature and environment, travel and art. She is the Scottish Editor of Irish Pages.
Don Paterson
Don Paterson is the author of sixteen books of poetry, aphorism, criticism, memoir and poetic theory. His poetry has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, three Forward Prizes, the T.S. Eliot Prize on two occasions, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of St Andrews and for twenty-five years was Poetry Editor at Picador Macmillan. He has long had a parallel career as a jazz guitarist. He lives in Kirriemuir, Angus.
Chris Agee
Chris Agee is a poet, essayist, photographer, editor and publisher. He was born in San Francisco and grew up in Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island. After high school and a year in Aix-en-Provence, France, he attended Harvard University and since graduation has lived in Ireland. His third collection of poems, Next to Nothing, was shortlisted in Britain for the 2009 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and its sequel, Blue Sandbar Moon, appeared in 2018. He is the Editor of Irish Pages and The Irish Pages Press, and edited Balkan Essays, the sixth volume of Hubert Butler’s essays, published simultaneously in Croatian by the Zagreb publishing house Fraktura. His “poetic work of non-fiction” on the President’s first term, Trump Rant, was published in 2021. He lives in Belfast, and divides his time between Ireland, Scotland and Croatia.
Kathleen Jamie was born in the West of Scotland in 1962. She is the author of eleven collections of poems, including The Tree House (Picador, 2004: winner of the Forward Prize and Scottish Book of the Year), Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead: Poems 1980-94 (Bloodaxe Books, 2002: shortlisted for the 2003 International Griffin Prize), The Overhaul (Picador, 2012: shortlisted for the 2012 T. S. Eliot Prize, winner of the 2012 Costa Poetry Award), and The Bonniest Companie (Picador, 2015). Her non-fiction work includes Among Muslims (Sort of Books, 2002), Findings (Sort of Books, 2007), Sightlines (Sort of Books, 2012: joint winner with Robert McFarlane of the 2013 Dolman Travel Award, winner of 2014 John Burroughs Award and the 2014 Orion Book Award) and Surfacing (Sort of Books, 2019). In 2017, she received the Ness Award from the Royal Geographical Society for “outstanding creative writing at the confluence of travel, nature and culture.” Her latest books are Cairn (Sort of Books, 2024) and The Keelie Hawk (Picador, 2024). She lives with her family in Fife.
Originally from Dundee, Scotland, Don Paterson left school at 16 and moved to London to pursue music and join a band. He found success with the jazz-folk ensemble Lammas, but was captivated by poetry upon encountering poet Tony Harrison, among others. He is the author of nine collections of poems, most recently 40 Sonnets (Faber, 2015) and Zonal (Faber, 2020), as well as several poetry anthologies and collections of aphorisms. He continues to perform as a jazz guitarist and lives in Dundee, Scotland.
Niall Campbell is a poet from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. His first poetry collection, Moontide (2014), was published by Bloodaxe Books and won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and the Saltire First Book of the Year. Noctuary (2019), his second collection, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. His latest collection, The Island in the Sound (Bloodaxe) was published in 2024. He is the Poetry Editor of Poetry London and lives in Newport on Tay, Fife.