Polly Atkin

 Event 

Polly Atkin: Writing Place, Belonging and Disability

The Research Centre for Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa is delighted to welcome poet and non-fiction writer Polly Atkin, who will explore themes of place, belonging and disability through her own poetry and through recovering the life and work of Dorothy Wordsworth. 

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), supported by a 2020 Northern Writers Award. She has also published three pamphlets: bone song (Aussteiger, 2008), Shadow Dispatches (Seren, 2013) and With Invisible Rain (New Walk: 2018).

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 centre voices that are currently at the margins of outdoor, mountain and nature writing. Her biography of 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 exploring place, belonging and disability.