Saraband authors contribute to Kathleen Jamie’s Antlers of Water
Posted on August 20, 2020
Antlers of Water, the first ever collection of contemporary Scottish writing on nature and landscape, showcases the diversity and radicalism of new Scottish nature writing today. Published by Canongate and edited, curated and introduced by the award-winning Kathleen Jamie, the book features prose, poetry and photography.
Saraband authors Amanda Thomson (A Scots Dictionary of Nature), Chitra Ramaswamy (Expecting) and Jim Crumley (most recently, The Nature of Summer) have all contributed to the collection, alongside writers such as Amy Liptrot, Malachy Tallack, Karine Polwart and many more. Antlers of Water urges us to renegotiate our relationship with the more-than-human world, in writing which is by turns celebratory, radical and political.
Amanda Thomson
Amanda Thomson is a visual artist and writer who teaches at the Glasgow School of Art. Her artwork is often about notions of home, movement and migration, landscapes and how places come to be made. A Scots Dictionary of Nature, her debut book, brings together – for the first time – the deeply expressive vocabulary customarily used to describe land, wood, weather, birds, water and walking in Scotland. Thomson collates and celebrates these traditional Scots words, which reveal ways of seeing and being in the world that are in danger of disappearing forever. What emerges is a vivid evocation of the nature and people of Scotland, past and present; of lives lived between the mountains and the sky.
‘So good.’ Robert Macfarlane
A Scots Dictionary of Nature is available to buy here.
Chitra Ramaswamy
Chitra Ramaswamy is an award-winning journalist. After cutting her teeth at The Big Issue in Scotland, she moved to Scotland on Sunday and The Scotsman where she became one of the newspapers’ leading columnists, book reviewers, interviewers, magazine and feature writers. Her first book, Expecting, won the Saltire First Book of the Year Award 2016. She currently writes for a range of publications including the Guardian. She and her partner and their young son live in Edinburgh. When Chitra Ramaswamy discovered she was pregnant, she longed for a book that went above and beyond a manual; a book that did more than describe what was happening in her growing body. One that, instead, got to the very heart of this overwhelming, confusing and exciting experience.
‘An extraordinary book … to write so well, so richly about so ordinary an event. Lovely.’ Sara Maitland
Expecting is available to buy here.
Jim Crumley
Jim Crumley has written more than thirty books, mostly on the wildlife and wild landscape of his native Scotland. The first instalment of his Seasons series, The Nature of Autumn, was longlisted for the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize 2017 and shortlisted for the Richard Jefferies Society and White Horse Bookshop Literary Prize 2017. The follow-up to that book is the stunning The Nature of Winter. The third in the series, The Nature of Spring, was Radio 4’s Book of the Week.
“[A] beautiful book … [an] exceptional and intense quality of observation glows from every page … A wisdom that we need now, more than ever before.” Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman
The Nature of Summer, the final book of Seasons, is available to buy here.
Amanda Thomson and Chitra Ramaswamy join Kathleen Jamie to talk about Antlers of Water, Scotland, landscape and the more-than-human world around us as part of the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Monday 24th August 16.00–17.00.
The event is free and online.
Save your space here.