Lesley Harrison

Lesley Harrison lives in a village on the Angus coastline. Her writing takes place among the soundscapes, migration routes, relics and settlements of the North Atlantic rim, and asks how our experience of these is thinned or altered in this age of sudden change. The whale, a half-fabulous, transient creature, recurs throughout her writing as a reminder of the real proximity of the marvellous, and of the very frail ecologies of our lived world. Her most recent collection, Kitchen Music, was published simultaneously in the UK by Carcanet and the USA by New Directions. One Bird Flying (Mariscat), a sequence following part of the journeys of Marco Polo, was written while she worked in Mongolia; the pamphlet collection Blue Pearl (New Directions) was written during residencies in Greenland and Svalbard, the furthest reach of our North Sea whaling fleet. In her prose she considers the craft of writing a poetry which captures, rather than overwrites, the textures and voices of its place of origin.