ARAScotland are delighted to announce that Jamie Crawford, who you may know from BBC1’s ‘Scotland from the Sky’, will be the ARA Scotland Explore Your Archive Ambassador for 2019-2020!
James Crawford is an award-winning writer, publisher and broadcaster. His first major work of non-fiction, Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of the World’s Greatest Lost Buildings was published to critical acclaim in November 2015. Selected as a ‘Book of the Year’ by the New Statesman, the Independent and the Scotsman, it also led to appearances on the Today Programme, Start the Week and Newsnight, among others. In 2016 Fallen Glory was shortlisted for the Saltire Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award. In March 2017 it was published by Picador in the US, going on to feature in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and the National Post. The Wall Street Journal described it as ‘a book of and for the world’.
In 2018 James scripted and presented the three-part, landmark documentary series Scotland from the Sky on BBC One Scotland (shortlisted for the 2019 Royal Television Society Awards for Best Specialist Factual Documentary). A second three-part series followed in Spring 2019. For over a decade he has worked with and researched Scotland’s national collection of architecture, archaeology and aerial photography, and has written a number of photographic books on its history and application, including Above Scotland, Scotland’s Landscapes, Aerofilms: A History of Britain from Above and Scotland from the Sky, the book of the BBC series. He is also the co-author of Who Built Scotland: 25 Journeys in Search of A Nation, with Kathleen Jamie, Alexander McCall Smith, James Robertson and Alistair Moffat.
He was born in the Shetlands in 1978 and studied History and Philosophy of Law at the University of Edinburgh, winning the Lord President Cooper Memorial Prize. He went on to complete a Masters in Journalism and was a radio broadcast journalist before he moved to London to work as a literary agent. For the past eleven years he has been the Publisher at Historic Environment Scotland – the lead body for the historic and built environment in Scotland – winning the runner-up award for Publisher of the Year at the 2018 Saltire Awards and making the shortlist for Best Academic Publisher at the 2019 British Book Awards. In June 2019 he became Publisher at Birlinn Books.
In 2016 he was elected as Chair of the Board of Publishing Scotland, the network body for the publishing industry in Scotland. He lives in Edinburgh.
The Scottish Explore Your Archive Event will take place this November at the National Records of Scotland, and will feature a talk from Jamie, as well as a presentation from Dawn Sinclair, Harper Collins archivist. More information is available here,