Canongate signs Kathleen Jamie collection

Canongate will publish “the first ever modern collection of contemporary Scottish writing on nature and landscape” curated by award-winning Scottish poet and essayist Kathleen Jamie.

Publishing director Francis Bickmore acquired world rights, including audio, to Antlers of Water: Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland, edited by Jamie, from Jenny Brown at Jenny Brown Associates. It is scheduled for publication in hardback in August 2020.

Edited, curated and introduced by the award-winning author of Findings, Antlers of Water features prose, poetry and photography. Contributors include Amy Liptrot, Jen Hadfield, Malachy Tallack, Chitra Ramaswamy, Jim Crumley, Linda Cracknell, Karine Polwart, Gavin Francis and 15 other writers.

“Featuring all new writing, Antlers of Water urges us to renegotiate our relationship with the more-than-human world, and is by turns celebratory, radical and political,” said Canongate. 

Jamie, who is an award-winning Scottish poet and essayist, and professor of creative writing at the University of Stirling, said: “Antlers of Water brings together, for the first time, contemporary Scottish writers who attend to the living world around them. The natural world is not a backdrop to their human concern, it is their human concern. They write out of fear, anger, joy and chiefly love of their homeland and fellow creatures. Writing on nature and environment has never been so urgent or so necessary, as we work out how to face the future not only of Scotland but of the planet.”

Bickmore added: “Kathleen Jamie’s anthology is a timely addition to the canon of writing about people and the natural environment. Our relationship between self and place has never been more critical than at this fragile point in environmental history. This book brings together a rich variety of perspectives that invite us to pay closer attention to the landscape and wildlife of Scotland, and to better understand our particular janitorial responsibility to the landscape and wildlife of Scotland both today and tomorrow.”

Brown said: “Contemporary Scottish writers excel when writing on nature and landscape, but, until now, no collection has brought these voices together. Kathleen Jamie is the perfect editor to introduce this work which is both in a Scottish tradition, and in a global awakening.”