Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson in Conversation with Chris Agee

Ten years after the Independence Referendum, Irish Pages asks diverse Scottish writers of distinction – established, mid-career and new – to think about their country, and take stock of the current state of its culture and polity, language and literature, ecology and environment, while a specially curated selection of Scotland’s emerging poets will offer a younger perspective. How will Scotland fare in an era of momentous and unpredictable political change? Stands Scotland where it did?

Co-edited by Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson.

Kathleen Jamie is a poet and essayist. Her poetry collections include The Overhaul, which won the 2012 Costa Poetry Prize, and The Tree House, which won the Forward Prize. The Bonniest Company won the 2015 Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award. Her non-fiction essays are collected in the three highly regarded books: Findings, Sightlines, and Surfacing, all regarded as important contributions to the “new nature writing”. In 2024 she published Cairn,“a view from the strange here-and-now”, and The Keelie Hawk, a collection of poems in Scots. Between 2010 and 2020 Kathleen was Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Stirling, and from 2021–24 she served as Scotland’s Makar, or National Poet. Kathleen’s interests include archaeology, nature and environment, travel and art. She is the Scottish Editor of Irish Pages.

Don Paterson is the author of sixteen books of poetry, aphorism, criticism, memoir and poetic theory. His poetry has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, three Forward Prizes, the T.S. Eliot Prize on two occasions, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of St Andrews and for twenty-five years was Poetry Editor at Picador Macmillan. He has long had a parallel career as a jazz guitarist. He lives in Kirriemuir, Angus.

Chris Agee is a poet, essayist, photographer, editor and publisher. He was born in San Francisco and grew up in Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island. After high school and a year in Aix-en-Provence, France, he attended Harvard University and since graduation has lived in Ireland. His third collection of poems, Next to Nothing, was shortlisted in Britain for the 2009 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and its sequel, Blue Sandbar Moon, appeared in 2018. He is the Editor of Irish Pages and The Irish Pages Press, and edited Balkan Essays, the sixth volume of Hubert Butler’s essays, published simultaneously in Croatian by the Zagreb publishing house Fraktura. His “poetic work of non-fiction” on the President’s first term, Trump Rant, was published in 2021. He lives in Belfast, and divides his time between Ireland, Scotland and Croatia.

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