Sightlines, Kathleen Jamie

Kathleen Jamie encourages a closer look at our surroundings, in Sightlines pulling your focus towards whale bones to breeding gannets, the aurora borealis to cells beneath a hospital microscope. In the chapter The Hvalsalen, she guides you through ancient whale skeletons hanging in the Natural History Museum of Bergen, Norway — ducking under ribcages, the smell of whale oil releasing from brushed bone. Her writing is as much about communities (ancient and present) as it is about nature - if there’s even a line between the two, which is always up for debate - and demands, albeit gently, a shift in perspective of each.

You can read a review of Sightlines on Caught By The River here, and we came across a short video of Jamie reading an excerpt from The Hvalsalen here.

Kathleen Jamie is a poet and essayist raised in Currie, near Edinburgh. Following her first collection of essays, Findings, Sightlines won the John Burroughs Medal and the Orion Book Award in the USA and in 2019 she released her third, Surfacing, which has been shortlisted for the 2019 Highland Book Prize alongside David Gange, Roseanne Watt and Ali Smith.