Robert Alan Jamieson is a Scottish

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

 and Shetlandic poet and novelist who grew up on the crofting community of Sandness

Sandness

Sandness is a headland and district in the west of Mainland, Shetland. The "d" is not pronounced locally.The headland flanks the south side of Papa Sound near Papa Stour leading into St Magnus Bay and the district includes the headland and forms the mainland part of Walls parish...

. He is currently based in Edinburgh

Edinburgh

Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland, the second largest city in Scotland, and the eighth most populous in the United Kingdom. The City of Edinburgh Council governs one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas. The council area includes urban Edinburgh and a rural area...

, Scotland, where he works as a Creative Writing tutor at Edinburgh University. He was co-editor of the Edinburgh Review

Edinburgh Review

The Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802, was one of the most influential British magazines of the 19th century. It ceased publication in 1929. The magazine took its Latin motto judex damnatur ubi nocens absolvitur from Publilius Syrus.In 1984, the Scottish cultural magazine New Edinburgh Review,...

 from 1993–1998, as well as being a Creative Writing Fellow at the Universities of Glasgow

University of Glasgow

The University of Glasgow is the fourth-oldest university in the English-speaking world and one of Scotland's four ancient universities. Located in Glasgow, the university was founded in 1451 and is presently one of seventeen British higher education institutions ranked amongst the top 100 of the...

 and Strathclyde, 1998-2001.

Novels

• Soor Hearts (1984),
• Thin Wealth (1986)
• A Day at the Office (1991), which was named by the Edinburgh based List Magazine as one of the 100 Best Scottish Books of All Time, commenting that "each page of this book – a precursor to much modern experimental Scottish fiction – looks more like a work of art than a novel".
• Da Happie Laand (2010)

Poetry

Jamieson writes in the Scots dialect of Shetlandic

Shetlandic

Shetlandic, usually referred to as Shetland by native speakers, is spoken in the Shetland Islands north of mainland Scotland and is, like Orcadian, a dialect of Insular Scots...

. Some of his works are:

• Shoormal (1986)
• Nort Atlantik Drift (1999), reprinted in a bilingual edition in 2007. Includes "Laamint fir da tristie".
• Ansin t'Sjaetlin: some responses to the language question (2005)