Nancy Campbell's Blog

Out this summer! THUNDERSTONE is a tale of love, loss and vintage caravans.Excited to be back on tour with this memoir of the recent lockdown, and its aftermath in a 1984 Buccaneer caravan. I’ll be at Edinburgh International Book Festival and PoliNations Festival in Scotland this August, and Books on Tyne in November. More events and bookshop signings up and down the country are listed on the

After a year of voyaging through dictionaries in search of snow stories from around the world, I'm over the moon to announce my new book Fifty Words for Snow published this week by Elliott & Thompson. Fifty Words for Snow covers the alphabet from avalanche (French) to zud (Mongolian). It is a compendium of worldwide winter words: from American Sign Language (via a story of snowboarding at the

Last week I arrived at the Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Concordia in Bamberg, Germany where I will be based for the next eleven months as a Literature Fellow. The Künstlerhaus hosts a number of artists, writers and composers from Germany and one other country each year, with scholarships provided by the Free State of Bavaria. You can see below the warm welcome given to the British artists

The Library of Ice has been longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2019, open to all works of literature written in English and published in the UK. The Academy judges Kate Clanchy (chair), Chloe Aridjis and Owen Sheers nominated 20 books (pictured above) for the £30,000 prize, which will be announced on 20 May. Congratulations to my fellow nominees!



 I'm very grateful to the Academy,

On 30 January the Italian publishing house Bompiani released La Biblioteca del Ghiaccio, a new translation of The Library of Ice by Andrea Asioli. Italian readers will be able to make discoveries about ice not only in the polar regions but also closer to home: for example, the book recounts the role of the weather on the Italian Front during World War I (or the Winter War) and the early

Canal Wreath by Phil Speight





This year I was commissioned to write a winter poem for The Poetry Society. I decided to take as my theme the hard graft that goes into maintaining a narrowboat during the coldest part of the year, as well as a life aboard, in particular the restoration of the traditional 'roses and castles' decorations.



The poem appears on the reverse of cards (blank

It's one month since the publication of The Library of Ice, and I'm grateful that the book has (so far) received incredibly perceptive and positive reviews. Here's a round up of those available online - click on the link to read the review in full.

"A refreshing lack of romanticism." Gavin Francis in The Guardian
"At the end of her wanderings, which are simply but beautifully related, Ms

The Library of Ice is published on 1 November. I'm delighted to be able to share its first review already (many thanks to Arabella Currie writing for Oxford Writers' House).



If you'd like to join me to celebrate ice and its many voices, look out for events happening around the country in November and December. 



You can purchase a copy of The Library of Ice online, or find it at your

Book bloggers, book reviewers and journalists are invited to request their advance copies of The Library of Ice: Readings from a Cold Climate via NetGalley. Available now!

With Canal & River Trust staff and volunteers in Wigan



In July I spent a week travelling along the Leeds & Liverpool Canal - the UK's longest - by kayak, meeting people who live and work on the canal and gathering material for poems for the Canal Laureate project. Huge thanks to The Poetry Society, the Canal & River Trust, and the many individuals I met on the towpath for helping to make