“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 non-fiction writer whose work embraces themes of landscape, migration and memory, climate and culture. In 2020 she received the prestigious Ness Award for environmental writing from the Royal Geographical Society for a decade-long creative response to the Arctic across works of non-fiction (The Library of Ice), poetry (Disko Bay) and artist’s books (How to Say ‘I Love You’ in Greenlandic).  Subsequently, Nancy turned her attention closer to home as the UK’s Canal Laureate, a project managed by The Poetry Society and the Canal & River Trust. 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; they are collected in the pamphlet Navigations (2020).

A third book of poems, Uneasy Pieces (2022) charts borders in the era of Brexit and the experience of caring for a partner with aphasia. Thunderstone, an acclaimed memoir of post-pandemic housing precarity, was awarded the 2023 TLS Ackerley Prize. Horatio Clare described the book as ‘a classic’ and ‘a rich newcomer to the latest and most exciting department of place writing.’ Other recent texts have been commissioned by arts and heritage organizations including the Royal Academy, the British Library, the BBC, the National Poetry Library and World Book Night.

A keen believer in radical and alternative models of publishing, Nancy has worked collaboratively with choreographers, composers, visual artists, bookbinders, anthropologists and neuroscientists and is dedicated to developing innovative projects that push the boundaries of the written word. She supports the work of fellow writers through mentoring and publishing enterprises, and serves on the judging panel for the Creative Future Awards. In a career spanning two decades, she has held numerous international research residencies, from Upernavik Museum on Greenland to the Jan Michalski Foundation in Switzerland, and she has been a Hawthornden Fellow. Recent honours have included the Otis Environmental Fellowship at Bates College, USA, and a semester as Visiting Professor of Literature at the Free University of Berlin.

email: nancy@nancycampbell.co.uk

Image credit: Markus Wächter for Berliner Zeitung, Germany