Book of the Month competition: Cairn by Kathleen Jamie
We are excited to offer five copies of Cairn by Scotland's Makar Kathleen Jamie in our August Book of the Month competition, courtesy of our friends at Sort of Books.
To be in with a chance of winning this essential collection of new writing, all you need to do is answer the question at the bottom of the page by midnight on 31 August 2024.
All entrants must reside in the UK and full terms and conditions apply. Check out our competitions page to find more giveaways.
About Cairn by Kathleen Jamie
As she reached her 60th year, author and poet Kathleen Jamie turned to a new form of writing: personal notes, prose poems, micro-essays, fragments. In her new book they are arranged together like the stones of a wayside cairn, marking changes to an inner and outer landscape.
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.
Q&A with Kathleen Jamie
How did you first get into writing?
Like many teenagers, I began writing quietly in my room. I just kept going as I realised it could offer a world, possibly even a career, a life much more free and exciting than that which was being held out to me otherwise, as a schoolgirl in the 1970s. I kept going and kept going.
What can readers expect from Cairn?
Well, please don't expect a collection of poetry. It's not that. Neither is it a selection of non-fiction essays, as I have written before. I'm working with a new kind of form, non-fiction sure but micro-essays, just a page or two long. Observations, witnessings, views from the here and now, it's the pieces all accumulated into a 'cairn', a market on the way.
What informs your choice of writing an idea as a poem or piece of non-fiction?
I wouldn't say it was a 'choice'. More a discovery. Some things, long travel pieces, for example, will be written as prose from the start. But shorter pieces, I just have to make a first draft or two and then is a matter of listening, feeling what the work wants to be. Finding the form for the work happens as it goes and is one of the pleasures of writing it.