Please note, this audio edition alternates between sections written and performed in the Orkney dialect, and their English translations.
Astrid is returning home from art school on Mars, looking for inspiration. Darling is fleeing a life that never fit, searching for somewhere to hide. They meet on Deep Wheel Orcadia, a distant space station struggling for survival as the pace of change threatens to leave the community behind.
Deep Wheel Orcadia is a magical first: a science-fiction verse-novel written in the Orkney dialect. This unique adventure in minority language poetry is followed by a parallel translation into playful and vivid English, so the listener will miss no nuance of the original. The rich and varied cast weaves a compelling, lyric and effortlessly readable story around place and belonging, work and economy, generation and gender politics, love and desire – all with the lightness of touch, fluency and musicality one might expect of one the most talented poets to have emerged from Scotland in recent years. Hailing from Orkney, Harry Josephine Giles is widely known as a fine poet and spellbindingly original performer of their own work; Deep Wheel Orcadia now strikes out into audacious new space. Harry Josephine Giles is a writer and performer from Orkney, living in Edinburgh. Their collection Tonguit was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and The Games for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and Saltire Prize for Best Collection. They have a strong spoken word scene presence – they were the 2009 BBC Scotland slam champion, and their theatre has also toured globally, including Forest Fringe (UK), NTI (Latvia), Verb Festival (Aotearoa) and Teszt (Romania). Deep Wheel Orcadia is, effortlessly, a first: a science-fiction verse-novel written in the Orcadian dialect, it's also the first full-length book in the Orkney language in over fifty years.
