This gallery contains 1 photo.
I’ve been listening to the 2025 BBC Reith Lectures, given by Rutger Bregman, the young Dutch historian who became an international sensation in 2019 after standing up at the Davos World Economic Forum and berating a room full of billionaires for … Continue reading
This gallery contains 1 photo.
Growing up in Scotland in the 1950s and 1960s, Scots was, unsurprisingly, the language I was most likely to hear when I set foot outside the family home. This was the Scots of rural Perthshire where we lived, one of … Continue reading
This gallery contains 2 photos.
When you write a book about someone you enter into a relationship with them, even if they are dead and the relationship is imaginary. It continues to exist after the book is published, the promotional work is done, and you … Continue reading
This gallery contains 1 photo.
Two years ago I published a biography of my great-great uncle. He and I were born almost a century apart: he in 1852, I in 1949. We also arrived in South America almost a century apart, in 1870 and 1972 … Continue reading
This gallery contains 1 photo.
I’m back in a place I love. I haven’t been here for eight years and my first impression on arrival was how beautiful it is. I had forgotten. An hour north of Seville, tucked into the side of a wooded … Continue reading
Last Friday we launched Don Roberto: the Adventure of Being Cunninghame Graham at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh – a fitting venue since its director, Donald Smith, first encouraged me to give the talk which later became the book. … Continue reading
I was surprised yesterday morning by the very strong impulse to write a blog. It’s two-and-a-half years since I last posted, in which time I’ve given little thought to A Few Kind Words. But yesterday, the project that has occupied … Continue reading
(Also available as a podcast here) Front lines are on all our minds right now. I think of poetry as language’s front line, the place where things can at once be at their most considered and their most intense, raw … Continue reading
Twenty-five years ago I published a novel called The Mapmaker. Set in 1349, the year the Black Death reached England, it tells the story of two young men who are driven from their village and find themselves following a mysterious … Continue reading
The story of Jamie's extraordinary great-great-uncle. Published June 2023 by Scotland Street Press.
Making a deeper connection with words - the acclaimed creative writing programme
12 chapters, 12 authors, the collective wisdom from 15 years of running courses around the world
A masterclass in business writing and communication from John Simmons and Jamie Jauncey.
A gripping story of conflict in a Scotland of the not-too-distant future
A Few Kind Words 