Kathleen Jamie was born in Renfrewshire in 1962, and studied philosophy at Edinburgh University. She has published several collections of poetry, including Black Spiders (Salamander Press, 1982), A Flame in Your Heart, with Andrew Greig (Bloodaxe Books, 1986), The Way We Live (Bloodaxe Books, 1987), The Autonomous Region: poems and photographs from Tibet, with Sean Mayne Smith (Bloodaxe Books, 1993), The Queen of Sheba (Bloodaxe Books, 1994), Jizzen (Picador, 1999), The Tree House (Picador, 2004) and The Overhaul (Picador, 2012), as well as Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead: Poems 1980-1994 (Bloodaxe Books, 2002), which was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize.

The Tree House won the 2004 Forward Poetry Prize and the 2005 Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award. The Overhaul won the 2012 Costa Poetry Award. She has received several other awards for her poetry, including a Somerset Maugham Award, the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Single Poem, a Paul Hamlyn Award and a Creative Scotland Award, and has twice won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.

She also writes non-fiction. A travel book about Northern Pakistan, The Golden Peak (Virago, 1992), was updated and reissued by Sort Of Books as Among Muslims: Meetings at the Frontiers of Pakistan, in 2002. Findings (2005), a collection of essays and observations on her native Scotland, was followed by Sightlines (2012), essays based on a second set of journeys, both from Sort Of Books.

She lives in Fife, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. After teaching for many years at the University of St Andrews, she took up her present post of Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Stirling in 2011.