This stimulating and inspiring session will offer rare insights into the Laurel Prize’s 2025 finalists and exploring what these collections say about the contemporary landscape of ecopoetry. New & experienced poets welcome, please bring a laptop or pen & paper if possible.

Kathleen Jamie is a poet and essayist. Her work concerns nature, travel and culture. Her poetry collections include The Overhaul, which won the 2012 Costa Poetry Prize, and The Tree House, which won the Forward prize.

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’. The Bonniest Companie appeared in 2015, and won the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award. In 2024 she published Cairn, ‘a view from the strange here-and-now’, and The KeelieHawk, a collection of poems in Scots. Kathleen’s interests are in archaeology, nature and environment, travel and art. From 2021-24 Kathleen served as Scotland’s ‘Makar’, or National Poet.