Words From Isolation: With Lennie Penny & Nancy Campbell

*A proper video will follow! Connectivity issues in the garden meant we had to do an inpromptue phone livestream, but recording will be up soon!*

Languages are organic, ever-changing and blooming organisms. They are created by the people who speak them, in aid of communication, of expressing what’s inside of us to those around us. What then, is the role of language when the nature of connection with others drastically changes, such as during a pandemic?

Lennie Pennie became a TikTok sensation during lockdown, presenting a word of the day in Scots, writing and performing her work. After a year spent as a carer for a person recovering language following a stroke, author Nancy Campbell bought her first home, a van which she drove to a piece of woodland. Both writers join us for a broad-reaching conversation about their experiences of creating, and being creative with language, during a time of isolation and crisis.

Our host for the event is the author & poet Harry Josephine Giles.

Our speakers and chair:

Nancy Campbell is a poet and non-fiction writer described as ‘deft, dangerous and dazzling’ by the former Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. Her books include Fifty Words for Snow, a Waterstones Book of the Month; The Library of Ice: Readings in a Cold Climate; Disko Bay and How to Say ‘I Love You’ in Greenlandic. She was appointed Canal Laureate by The Poetry Society in 2018, writing poems for installation across the UK waterways from London Docklands to the River Severn, and received the Ness Award from the Royal Geographical Society in 2020. She lives in a van outside Oxford.

Harry Josephine Giles is a writer and performer from Orkney, living in Leith. Their verse novel Deep Wheel Orcadia was published by Picador in October 2021 and was a Poetry Book Society Winter Selection. Their poetry collections The Games (Out-Spoken Press, 2018) and Tonguit (Freight Books 2015) were between them shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Saltire Prize and the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. They have a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Stirling. Their show Drone debuted in the Made in Scotland Showcase at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe and toured internationally, and their performance What We Owe was picked by the Guardian's best-of-the-Fringe 2013 roundup – in the “But Is It Art?” category. www.harryjosephine.com