Jamie Shaw grew up in the bizarre conundrums of Canberra (Australia) in the 1970’s – Art, teen angst, punk music, a planned city and the middle class mayhem of the suburbs left him with a lasting appetite for… well anything. He left school at seventeen and worked in a variety of jobs including a registry clerk at Parliament House, laboring and building, printing, stone masonry, Union organizer, and as a courier in Sydney.
Jamie left Australia in 1989 to travel in Nepal, India and Northern Pakistan. The raw contradictions of poverty and affluence and the sublime beauty of the landscapes and the amazing resilience of the human spirit in these countries gave him a new and energized perspective on life.
Returning to Australia, he completed an Environmental Science degree at the University of Canberra. Whilst at university Jamie also became involved in the forest preservation movement and blockading.
The conflicts and intractability of parts of this struggle was a spotlight on the human syndrome for him – the endless conflict between instinct and intellect that dominates all cultures, religions and beliefs. This overarching theme has trampled, like a bull in camouflage fatigues, throughout Jamie's own life and the world he watches.
Jamie spent many years working with the National parks and Wildlife Service, specializing in Bush fire ecology. After being injured in a bushfire in 2000 and spending two years in hospital Jamie has now moved in a new direction - writing. Years of conservation experience, combined with a vision born of his personal struggle, give his writing a unique perspective.
Jamie has retained his love of travel, places, and the joy of difference. In recent years he has visited Antarctica, the Arctic and Greenland, Laos, China and the countries of Central Asia, Syria and Turkey as well as many other counties.
Jamie’s first book, Iso and the Bushfire, was published in November 2006 and won the NSW Writers Centre’s Open Book Award for Children’s Literature in 2008.
He is currently editing his first Novel and working on a book of navel gazing poetry.
