“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 based in Oxford, UK. Her work embraces themes of landscape, migration and memory, climate and culture. In 2020 she received the prestigious Ness Award Society 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, was published in 2022. These prose poems on the experience of caring for someone with aphasia can be read in parallel with Nancy’s acclaimed memoir of life after lockdown in an old Buccaneer caravan by the River Thames, Thunderstone, winner of the 2023 TLS Ackerley Prize for biography. Horatio Clare describes the book as ‘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.

Nancy has worked collaboratively with choreographers, composers, visual artists, bookbinders, anthropologists and neuroscientists and she is dedicated to developing innovative projects that push the boundaries of the written word, as well as supporting the work of fellow writers through teaching and publishing projects. She has held numerous international research residencies, most recently as Visiting Professor of Literature at the Free University of Berlin.

email: nancy@nancycampbell.co.uk

(occasional) IG: @nancycampbelle

Image credits: Ella Foote for Outdoor Swimming Magazine, UK; Markus Wächter for Berliner Zeitung, Germany