Kathleen Jamie: 'Nature writing has been colonised by white men'

The genre’s current boom is dominated by middle-class males, she says, but the author of Surfacing prefers to concentrate on ‘deep time’

Kathleen Jamie recently spent “valuable minutes” of her life totting up all the books and authors who have been shortlisted for the prestigious Wainwright prize for British nature and travel writing. The tally is 26 books by men and 14 by women. For winners, the ratio is five men to one woman.

Jamie – a poet whose genre-stretching first book of essays, 2005’s Findings, was a much-praised widening of the growing field of nature writing – is aghast at the preponderance of male nature writers. “Only 15 years ago,” she says when I meet her in her home city of Edinburgh, “nature writing was barely there. It seems very strange that this thing that barely existed can suddenly ignite. I hate to say it, but it has been colonised – by middle-class white men. I’m interested in how that’s happened. And if you understand how that’s happened, you understand the whole godforsaken political state of this country.” The cafe table is being softly thumped.