Harry Josephine Giles – författare

Winner of the 2022 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction Book of the YearAstrid is returning home from art school on Mars, looking for inspiration. Darling is fleeing a life that never fit, searching for somewhere to hide. They meet on Deep Wheel Orcadia, a distant space station struggling for survival as the pace of change threatens to leave the community behind.Deep Wheel Orcadia is a magical first: a science-fiction verse-novel written in the Orkney dialect. This unique adventure in minority language poetry comes with a parallel translation into playful and vivid English, so the reader will miss no nuance of the original. The rich and varied cast weaves a compelling, lyric and effortlessly readable story around place and belonging, work and economy, generation and gender politics, love and desire – all with the lightness of touch, fluency and musicality one might expect of one the most talented poets to have emerged from Scotland in recent years. Hailing from Orkney, Harry Josephine Giles is widely known as a fine poet and spellbindingly original performer of their own work; Deep Wheel Orcadia now strikes out into audacious new space.

A Scotsman Poetry Book of the YearThem! by Harry Josephine Giles is an exuberant collection of poems about trans life as it is lived today, through the lenses of work, technology and ecology.In Them! Giles excavates the lexicon of sex and gender, singing back with irony, fury and possibility. The visual poetics of Them! create an unusually dynamic reading experience as she finds new ways 'to sing, shout and strike in the cracks of what's possible'. We hear from 'the reasonable people' and the bureaucrats; a bewildered worker contemplates the horrors of neoliberalism; a group of women at a quiet dinner encounter a punitive, spectral guest.Throughout, Giles weighs the artist's need for reverie against the noise that surrounds the activist. How to be both? Must we set aside the struggle in order to create, or 'to hear a bird'?‘Poetry’, writes Giles, ‘is the best way I know to magic the rage I feel into something more alive, and to offer that spark to others.’ Drawing on an abundance of influences with subversive wit, Them! is a zestful poetic intervention from one of this generation’s most necessary poets.'A bold and inimitable tour-de-force' – Guardian

A Scotsman Poetry Book of the YearThem! by Harry Josephine Giles is an exuberant collection of poems about trans life as it is lived today, through the lenses of work, technology and ecology.In Them! Giles excavates the lexicon of sex and gender, singing back with irony, fury and possibility. The visual poetics of Them! create an unusually dynamic reading experience as she finds new ways 'to sing, shout and strike in the cracks of what's possible'. We hear from 'the reasonable people' and the bureaucrats; a bewildered worker contemplates the horrors of neoliberalism; a group of women at a quiet dinner encounter a punitive, spectral guest.Throughout, Giles weighs the artist's need for reverie against the noise that surrounds the activist. How to be both? Must we set aside the struggle in order to create, or 'to hear a bird'?‘Poetry’, writes Giles, ‘is the best way I know to magic the rage I feel into something more alive, and to offer that spark to others.’ Drawing on an abundance of influences with subversive wit, Them! is a zestful poetic intervention from one of this generation’s most necessary poets.'A bold and inimitable tour-de-force' – Guardian

Winner of the 2022 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction Book of the YearAstrid is returning home from art school on Mars, looking for inspiration. Darling is fleeing a life that never fit, searching for somewhere to hide. They meet on Deep Wheel Orcadia, a distant space station struggling for survival as the pace of change threatens to leave the community behind.Deep Wheel Orcadia is a magical first: a science-fiction verse-novel written in the Orkney dialect. This unique adventure in minority language poetry comes with a parallel translation into playful and vivid English, so the reader will miss no nuance of the original. The rich and varied cast weaves a compelling, lyric and effortlessly readable story around place and belonging, work and economy, generation and gender politics, love and desire – all with the lightness of touch, fluency and musicality one might expect of one the most talented poets to have emerged from Scotland in recent years. Hailing from Orkney, Harry Josephine Giles is widely known as a fine poet and spellbindingly original performer of their own work; Deep Wheel Orcadia now strikes out into audacious new space.