With a poet’s eye and naturalist’s affinity for wild places, Kathleen Jamie reports from the field in a collection of fourteen essays in her book, Sightlines, which has won the 2014 Orion Book Award for Non-Fiction.
Jamie roams her native Scottish byways and hills and sails north to encounter whalebones and icebergs. Interweaving personal history with her scrutiny of landscape, she dissects whatever her gaze falls upon from vistas of cells beneath a hospital microscope, to orcas rounding a headland, to the aurora borealis lighting up the frozen sea.
In addition to the Orion Book Award for Nonfiction, she is also the winner of the John Burroughs Association 2014 Medal for Distinguished Natural History Book.