Lesley Harrison lives and works on the Angus coast.  In her writing, she explores how it is to live at the southern, temperate edge of a much colder northern world.  Drawing from archives, folk myth and cultural memory as well as her own explorations and experience, her poetry and prose make real our negotiation with, and our constant striving to give meaning and scale to, this unstable and ultimately unknowable space.

Selected poetry

Kitchen Music  (New Directions & Carcanet, 2023). “Harrison brings oceans inside her rooms, and catches the salt air of faraway places in the detailed work of fashioning these poems, each line and phrase flensed of all but the utterly necessary words that are spoken.”  Kirsty Gunn.

Disappearance (Shearsman, 2020).  First full-length collection of new work which examines our uneasy, unresolved relationship with the North Sea coastline and the wider north ocean beyond.

‘The Lurgies’, in Antlers of Water : Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland.  Kathleen Jamie (ed).  Canongate, 2020.

Blue Pearl (New Directions, 2017).  ‘a terrific pamphlet both in the quality of the poetry and the ideas it develops … a profound aesthetic response’.  Ian Davidson.   ‘it left me breathless’.  Nina Powles, Poetry Foundation.

Upstream (2013).  A poetics of hidden urban rivers.  Project funded by SNH & Creative Scotland. ‘Harrison is a clear-sighted, original poet, and this is a hugely impressive addition to her work’.  John Glenday

Beyond the Map (Mariscat, 2012). Sequence following the North Sea whaling ships up the east coast to Orkney and Shetland to the polar seas.

Ecstatics : a Language of Birds (Brae Editions, Orkney, 2011). Collaboration with artist Laura Drever. Winner, 2012 National Library of Scotland Callum Macdonald Award.   ‘A perfect union of line and land, word and flight’. Kathleen Jamie. ‘The Orkney landscape is there for sure … This little book is a delight to handle and peruse’. The Orcadian

One Bird Flying : Poems from the Great Road (Mariscat, 2009). Following the journals of Marco Polo, written while living in Mongolia in 2007-8.  Runner up, 2010 NLS Callum Macdonald Award.  ‘You cannot help thinking that this is what all poetry should do – find the truth in things, not beneath them – and how it should be produced: sensitively and with love’. Andrew McCulloch, TLS.  ‘Her landscapes are focused, powerfully simple… a slender, yet deeply satisfying book’. Alison Brackenbury, PN Review

Selected prose

Do birds sing? [forthcoming]

Hand Written: making a case for a difficult pen. PNReview 280, Nov-Dec 2024

Whaling and the Gothic north. PNReview 269, 2023.

For the North Sea Poets substack : short prose on poetry, poets and poetic places including Rabelais, W.S. Graham and the Northeast Passage : Lesley Harrison in Malcolm Mooney’s Land, The Fog House …