Professor of poetry wins Book of the Year honour

A professor of poetry has won Scotland’s most prestigious literary honour after challenging herself to pen a new piece of work every week.

The resulting collection saw Stirling University academic Kathleen Jamie pick up the prize for Scotland’s Book of the Year at the Scottish Literary Awards.

The Bonniest Companie – 51 poems which were all written during the course of 2014, the year of the referendum on Scottish independence – was described by the judges as “a visionary response to influential local and global forces and addresses Kathleen’s native Scotland and her place within it”.

Jamie, who published her first collection in 1982, while she was studying philosophy at Edinburgh University, was appointed chair of creative writing at Stirling University.

Jamie, who also won the Scottish Poetry Book of the Year prize at the ceremony in Edinburgh last night, said: “Scotland makes very good poets – a fact that’s still not acknowledged as it ought to be.”

Her collection edged out Highlands-set crime novel His Bloody Project – which also saw author Graeme Macrae Burnet nominated for the Booker Prize – for the overall prize after it was named Scottish Fiction Book of the Year.