Nancy Campbell writes poems, essays, and nonfiction books. Having completed her university studies in English at Oxford, she trained in the craft of letterpress printing, working at studios for art books in North America and the UK. Campbell uses a number of creative and innovative methods to explore the consequences of climate change in her literary work. She is particularly interested in marginalized and endangered languages, considering the environment as an archive that traces the relationship between the speaker and the ecology of the landscape they inhabit.

Her first poetry collection Disko Bay (2015) portrays the struggle for existence in the harsh polar environment, the loss of ancient languages, and the tensions between modern life and traditional ways of subsistence on Greenland’s west coast. Through this medium she deftly conveys the impacts of climate change on the Arctic region. In 2020 Campbell received the prestigious Ness Award from the Royal Geographic Society for her diverse body of work on the physical environment, which includes the nonfiction works The Library of Ice (2018) and Fifty Words for Snow (2020), the poetry collections Disko Bay (2015) and Uneasy Pieces (2022), and the artist’s books Capturing Light (2022) and Grass of Parnassus (2023). 

Throughout the course of her inaugural lecture, she will talk about her poetic practice with regard to Disko Bay and Uneasy Pieces as well as other books she has published, including The Library of Ice and Fifty Words for Snow. These will serve as jumping-off points for the topics she has been addressing and discussing with students at Freie Universität Berlin this summer semester in her seminar “On Water and Other Voices,” such as more-than-human voices, book arts, ecopoetry, and the climate crisis.