Author: Iona Glen

Iona Glen is a writer and researcher based in Edinburgh, working in museums’ visitor services. She loves writing about women artists, nature, memory, and people’s relationships to their environments. Her creative non-fiction has been published by DearDamsels’ (SEALSKIN | Iona Glen explores her changing relationship with the skin she exists in. (deardamsels.com) and her analysis of Margaret Tait’s film Blue Black Permanent was published by Girls’ on Top's blog Read Me (Selkie Song: Female Creativity in Margaret Tait’s Blue Black Permanent — Girls on Tops (girlsontopstees.com). Her newsletter, the cherry log, explores humankind’s complex relationships to nature and the non-human world.

Voyager: The Constellations of Memory by Nona Fernández – a cosmic stellar tapestry

9th April 20239th April 2023 Iona Glen

Nona Fernández’s new book, Voyager: The Constellations of Memory, translated by Natasha Wimmer, combines astronomy’s physics with astrology’s storytelling to express the importance of memory, family and record-keeping.

An interview with award-winning poet Polly Atkin in Grasmere: ‘When is a cloud lonely in the Lake District?’

7th December 20228th December 2022 Iona Glen

Iona Glen meets award-winning poet, Polly Atkin, to discuss her recent biography Recovering Dorothy, how Dorothy Wordsworth’s illness has been overlooked in academic scholarship, the marginalisation of those with chronic ill health, poems as time machines and much more.

Rain & Moonlight: Weathering with Dorothy Wordsworth and Polly Atkin by Iona Glen

12th April 202213th April 2022 Iona Glen

Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals shine with moonlight and rain-washed landscapes, but did her later illness inhibit such vision? No, writes Iona Glen, who, when considering the poetry and criticism of Polly Atkin, sees Wordsworth’s creativity flourish in her periods of ill health.

A Home of the Muses by Iona Glen

19th August 202125th August 2021 Iona Glen

Iona Glen reflects on Celia Paul’s memoir, Self Portrait, the significance of the British Museum and Bloomsbury to the artist’s work, and her subversive vanquishing of “muse-dom” and patriarchal conventions through painting.

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