Contact

Email: hj@harryjosephine.com
Twitter: @HJosephineGiles
Facebook: @HJosephineGiles
Instagram: @HJosephineGiles

Bio

Harry Josephine Giles is a writer and performer from Orkney, now living in Leith. She has lived on four islands, each larger than the last. She has a MA in Theatre Directing from East 15 Acting School and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Stirling. Harry Josephine’s work generally happens in the crunchy places where performance and politics get muddled up.

As a poet, Harry Josephine has toured globally, given feature sets at venues from the Bowery Poetry Club to Edinburgh’s Hogmanay, performed at festivals from the New Zealand Writers Festival to Montreal’s Metropolis Bleu, and won multiple slams including the BBC Scotland Slam 2009. Their poetry collections — Tonguit (Freight Books 2015) and The Games (Out-Spoken Press 2018) — were shortlisted for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award (twice), the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and the Saltire Poetry Book of the Year. Their verse novel Deep Wheel Orcadia is coming out with Picador in October 2021, and they have a PhD in Creative Writing from Stirling

As a theatre artist, Harry Josephine has been featured in the SPILL National Platform, and at festivals including Forest Fringe (UK), NTI (Latvia), Verb Festival (Aotearoa) and Teszt (Romania). Their one-to-one show What We Owe was listed in the Guardian’s “Best of the Edinburgh Fringe” round-up – in the “But is it art?” section. Their multimedia poetry show Drone debuted in the Made in Scotland Showcase at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe and toured internationally.

You can read their full professional credits here.

Name and Pronouns

My name is Harry Josephine and it’s good to use that in full in formal settings, or Josie for short and in informal settings. If titles are needed, it’s Dr Giles. I use the pronouns “she” and “they”.