Weather, Words, and the Body
- Event type
- Lecture
- Address
- Woburn Suite, G22/26, Ground Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
- Speakers
- Jean McNeil (Author), Polly Atkin (Author), JR Carpenter (Author), Amanda Thomson (Author), Jessica J. Lee (Writer)
- Event dates
- Contact
- sas.events@sas.ac.uk Email only
A discussion featuring authors Jean McNeil, Polly Atkin, JR Carpenter and Amanda Thomson, chaired by Jessica J. Lee.
From far-distant Antarctic cold to the water of the Lake District, this panel will offer short readings and intimate conversations to spotlight literary women’s embodied experiences of weather and sensation through the written word; exploring the ways perceptions of weather can be both deeply personal and felt in the wider world.
You can book tickets to view the exhibition here.
This event is a collaboration between Artangel & SAS and SHL, organised by Jessica J Lee on behalf of the organisations.
All welcome- This event is free to attend, but booking is required. It will be held in-person only.
About Jessica J Lee
Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author, environmental historian, and winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, the Banff Mountain Book Award, and the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award.
She is the author of two books on nature writing titled Turning (2017) and Two Trees Make a Forest (2019), which was shortlisted for Canada Reads 2021. Lee has a PhD in Environmental History and Aesthetics and was writer-in-residence at the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology in Berlin between 2017–2018. She is also the founding editor of The Willowherb Review and a researcher at the University of Cambridge.
About Polly Atkin
Polly Atkin is a poet and nonfiction writer, living in the English Lake District. Her first poetry collection Basic Nest Architecture (Seren: 2017) is followed by Much With Body (Seren, 2021), a PBS Winter 2021 recommendation. She has also published three pamphlets: bone song (Aussteiger, 2008), Shadow Dispatches (Seren, 2013) and With Invisible Rain (New Walk: 2018).
Her biography Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband, 2021), is the first to focus on Dorothy’s later life and illness. She is working on a memoir in essays exploring place, belonging and disability.
She has taught English and Creative Writing at QMUL, Lancaster University, and the Universities of Strathclyde and Cumbria. In 2019 she co-founded the Open Mountain initiative at Kendal Mountain Festival, which seeks to recentre voices currently at the margins of outdoor, mountain and nature writing. In 2022 she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
About J.R. Carpenter
J. R. Carpenter is an artist and writer working across performance, print, and digital media. Questions of place, displacement, migration, and climate change have long pervaded her work. Her digital poem The Gathering Cloud won the New Media Writing Prize 2016. Her debut poetry collection An Ocean of Static was highly commended by the Forward Prizes 2018. Her most recent collection This is a Picture of Wind was listed in The Guardian’s Best Books of 2020. She was Writer in Residence at University of Alberta 2020-2021 and is currently a Research Fellow working on Weather Reports — Wind as Model, Media, and Experience (WeRep) at Winchester School of Art.
About Jean McNeil
Jean McNeil is the author of 15 books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and travel. She has collaborated with many scientific organisations, including the British Antarctic Survey, the Alfred Wegener Institute and the Natural Environment Research Council. Her memoir and travelogue based on her year as writer-in-residence with the British Antarctic Survey, Ice Diaries, won the Adventure Travel and Grand Prizes at the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival and was named one of the best nature writing books by The Guardian newspaper in 2018. Her most recent novel, Day for Night (2021) won the gold medal in literary fiction at the Independent Book Publisher Awards in the United States. She is Director of the Creative Writing programme at the University of East Anglia. Originally from Nova Scotia, Canada, she lives in London, UK.
About Amanda Thomson
Amanda Thomson is a visual artist, writer and researcher who also is a lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art. Her first book, A Scots Dictionary of Nature, a compendium of Scots Language words relating to land, weather, birds, water, wood and walking, was published by Saraband Books in 2018. Her second book, Belonging, natural histories of place, identity and home, has just been published by Canongate Books in 2022.
