KATHLEEN

JAMIE

Kathleen Jamie (b. 1962) is a writer of essays and poetry whose work has garnered her a long list of awards, including a Somerset Maugham Award (1995), the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year (2005), and two Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prizes (1996 and 2000). Although not widely known, her writing focuses on, as she puts it in a 2012 interview with The Guardian, “our relationship with what’s around us . . . our place in the natural world.” Her essay collections, including Findings (2005) and Sightlines (2012), take her to the fringes of landscape writing and remote regions where she’s able to turn observations into oddly quiet political statements. “My job,” she says, “is not to get angry and proselytize. Mine is an imaginative connection. It would be easy to jump in and be judgmental and start ranting but it does not make for good writing. . . .”

Jamie considers herself a child of Edinburgh, Scotland. She went to Edinburgh University to study philosophy and became a writer. Jamie has published seven collections of poetry and three collections of essays. Among Muslims: Every Day Life on the Frontiers of Pakistan (2002), the book from which “Shia Girls” comes, is an updated version of The Golden Peak (1993), which she wrote while traveling in northern areas of Pakistan. Among Muslims chronicles her return ten years later, post-9/11, into a dramatically changed Pakistan. “We sat around the oil-heater, with a kettle on top, and told about our lives, the lives of women with families,” she writes. “We had young children and frail elderly relatives, and jobs. That’s what ten years had done; turned us from Shia girls and Western girls into grown women. . . .”

The women and men in “Shia Girls” speak through Jamie’s observations and her reproductions of their conversations. It’s a piece of writing, a student said, that “is more of a conversation that includes me as an outsider than it is an essay.”