Collective Winner of the 2019 Highland Book Prize
Under the ravishing light of an Alaskan sky, objects are spilling from the thawing tundra linking a Yup’ik village to its hunter-gatherer past. In the shifting sand dunes of a Scottish shoreline, impressively preserved hearths and homes of Neolithic farmers are uncovered. In a grandmother’s disordered mind, memories surface of a long-ago mining accident and a ‘mither who was kind’.
For this luminous new essay collection, acclaimed author Kathleen Jamie visits archaeological sites and mines her own memories – of her grandparents, of youthful travels – to explore what surfaces and what reconnects us to our past. As always she looks to the natural world for her markers and guides. Most movingly, she considers, as her father dies, and her children leave home, the surfacing of an older, less tethered
sense of herself.
Surfacing offers a profound sense of time passing and an antidote to all that is instant, ephemeral, unrooted.
About the author
Award-winning poet, Kathleen Jamie was born in the west of Scotland in 1962. Her first travel book, Among Muslims (also published by Sort Of Books), was described as ‘utterly luminous’ (The Independent) and ‘one of the most powerful accounts by a contemporary Western writer’ (TLS).Her latest poetry collection, The Tree House (Picador), won the 2004 Forward prize.A part-time lecturer in Creative Writing at St Andrews University, Kathleen Jamie lives with her family in Fife.
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