“Any book by Nancy Campbell has to be worth reading.”
Dervla Murphy

“…she has invented a new kind of time-travel writing. She is unquestionably one of our brightest stars.”
Horatio Clare

“A deft, dangerous and dazzling poet writing from the furthest reaches of both history and climate change.”
Carol Ann Duffy

Nancy Campbell is a Scottish poet and writer of creative non-fiction whose work embraces themes of landscape and memory, climate and culture.

A major influence on Nancy’s thinking about place was the welcome she received on the island of Upernavik, Greenland and all that she learnt from the Kallallisut-speaking community there while Writer in Residence during the winter of 2010. Her research on the Arctic region and its global relevance continued over a further decade and several publications, among them The Library of Ice (2017, Simon & Schuster), Disko Bay (2015, Enitharmon) and How to Say I Love You in Greenlandic (2011, Bird Editions). This hybrid body of work was recognised by the Royal Geographical Society with the 2020 Ness Medal.

From 2018 to 2020 Nancy served as Canal Laureate for The Poetry Society and her texts commissioned for the 2,000 miles of waterways in the UK were collected in Navigations (2020, HappenStance). Many of the poems written during her laureateship were installed along the waterways where they could be seen projected on wharves at night, stencilled on towpaths, or engraved into fish gates. Nancy conducted many of her research trips by kayak, being a member of Oxford Falcons.

In Uneasy Pieces (2022, Guillemot Press), dedicated to a former partner who lives with aphasia, prose poems consider the politics of care, borders in the era of Brexit and the points at which communication fails. The collection can be read in tandem with Nancy’s acclaimed memoir of housing precarity on Oxford’s margins, Thunderstone, which was awarded the TLS Ackerley Prize in 2023. Horatio Clare describes the book as ‘a classic’. Other recent texts have been commissioned by arts and heritage organizations including the British Library, the BBC, the National Poetry Library and World Book Night. She has worked collaboratively with choreographers, composers, anthropologists and neuroscientists and is dedicated to developing innovative projects that push the boundaries of the written word.

A keen believer in radical and alternative models of publishing, Nancy’s career began with an apprenticeship in letterpress printing at Barbarian Press, Canada, in 2001, and she has worked on press editioning projects for artists such as Richard Long and Emily Martin in print studios including Bookworks (London); The New York Center for Book Arts; Woodside Press (Brooklyn); and Alembic Press (Oxford). Between 2005 and 2015 Nancy developed and ran her own press, Bird Editions, issuing innovative artists’ books on environmental themes. She continues to engage with contemporary book arts, both through her critical writing and collaborative projects with practitioners including Sarah Bodman, Angie Butler, Julie Johnstone, and Roni Gross.

Nancy supports the work of fellow writers through mentoring and publishing enterprises, and serves as a judge for the Creative Future Awards. She is a former commissioning editor for Dark Mountain, Oxford Poetry, and Stravaig, published by the Scottish Institute of Geopoetics. She has contributed to Royal Academy publications including books on Bill Jacklin RA and Barbara Rae RA. For several years she was the editor of Printmaking Today, a quarterly journal of international graphic art, and remains on its editorial board.

In a career spanning two decades, Nancy has been fortunate to exchange ideas with international colleagues through research and writing residencies, and her work has been influenced by time spent at Ilulissat Art Museum, Greenland; Skriðuklaustur, Gunnar Gunnarson’s house in Iceland; the Jan Michalski Foundation in the Swiss Jura; Künstlerhaus Villa Concordia in Bamberg, Germany, and Hawthornden Castle in Scotland. Recent honours have included the Otis Environmental Fellowship at Bates College, USA, and a Visiting Professorship in Literature at the Free University of Berlin.

email: nancy@nancycampbell.co.uk

Image credit: Markus Wächter for Berliner Zeitung, Germany