Nancy Campbell
Nancy Campbell is a British writer and artist whose recent work explores polar and marine environments. She has engaged in residencies at a number of ecological and research institutions, from the world’s most northerly museum on the island of Upernavik to the University of Oxford. She was a Hawthornden Fellow in 2013. Nancy’s books include The Night Hunter and Tikilluarit (Z’roah Press, New York, 2011/13), and How To Say ‘I Love You’ In Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet (Bird Editions, 2011) which won the Birgit Skiöld Award.
Her poems, essays and reviews are widely published, and she was awarded the Terrain Non-Fiction Prize in 2014 for ‘The Library of Ice’. Campbell is Canal Laureate 2018, sharing stories from the people and places she encounters during her travels along the 2,000 miles of the nation’s historic canals and waterways looked after by the Canal & River Trust.
Disko Bay
Shortlisted for the 2016 Forward Prize for best first collection
The Arctic has long been a place of encounters, and Disko Bay is a meeting point for whalers and missionaries, scientists and shamans. These poems relate the struggle for existence in the harsh polar environment, and address tensions between modern life and traditional ways of subsistence. As the environment begins to change, hunters grow hungry and their languages are lost. The final sequence, Jutland, moves the reader to the northern fringes of Europe, where shifting waterlines bear witness to the disappearing arctic ice.
Nakuarsuuvoq / The night hunter
I am a poet. I am...
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