Lesley Harrison was born in Ayrshire, Scotland. She has lived and worked in Istanbul, West Africa, Mongolia, and in Orkney, on Scotland's northern coastline. Her poems have been published in Poetry Ireland Review, the Antigonish Review, Ice Floe, Magma, the Island Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry pamphlets include Ecstatics: a language of birds (Brae Editions, 2011), a collaboration with Orkney artist Laura Drever which won the 2012 National Library of Scotland pamphlet competition, and One Bird Flying (Mariscat, 2009), a response to the journals of Marco Polo. She has held writing residencies in Iceland, Greenland, and Svalbard. She now lives on Scotland's Angus coastline. Blue Pearl was her most recent publication, from New Directions, New York (2017).