Collective residencies / LITERNATURE / Olot
NANCY CAMPBELL
From Tuesday, 13 October 2020 to Friday, 23 October 2020
Bio
Nancy Campbell is a Scottish poet and non-fiction writer whose books include The Library of Ice: Readings from a Cold Climate (Simon and Schuster, 2018), Disko Bay (Enitharmon, 2015) and How To Say ‘I Love You’ In Greenlandic (Bird Editions, 2011; winner of the Birgit Skiöld Award). Between 2010 and 2017 she undertook a series of residencies with Arctic and Scandinavian museums to research cultural shifts and climate crisis in the north. More recently Nancy has worked in Europe as the UK Canal Laureate; and as Literature Fellow at Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Concordia, Germany.
Project
The first translation into English of a selection of songs about the natural world collected in Greenland in 1935 by the French anthropologist Paul-Emile Victor (originally published as “Chants d’Ammassalik”, Copenhagen: 1991). These texts are the sole surviving record of a transient oral culture, and a detailed testament of Inuit knowledge of the Arctic environment. With the present global focus on the Arctic, a translation and new edition of these songs will benefit our understanding of the region and its people.