Hastings

My big news is I moved to the seaside in East Sussex! I now live a mere eight minute wheelchair stroll to the waves. Leaving London was not easy, but I have no regrets. I’m nearer my other half, and many lovely friends. I lost a garden… but gained the sea. A fair trade off, I would say. A good place to write.

My memoir First in the World Somewhere is still out there and doing well. And there’s one left on Amazon at the moment – will you be the one to buy that?

Autumn 2018: my year so far

Autumn 2018

Hello dear friends

How time truly flies and flips and leaves us wondering. Where did all that go?

My year has been one of changes big and small. Most recent and most exciting is the publication of my debut poetry collection, Come Home Alive published by the marvellous Burning Eye Books. Honoured and chuffed to be in such top Spoken Word company.

Go to this link to buy direct. And it is available in all the usual places.

https://burningeye.bigcartel.com/product/come-home-alive-by-penny-pepper

There will be launches in 2019 to tie in with my next big year long tour – The Naked Punk tour. Starting in February 2019, more information is coming soon. Hope to see hordes of you there! Am open to offers of more events and as usual, let me write for you, and speak at your event. Contact me via the online form.

Penny Pepper Bio

An acclaimed author, performer and activist, Penny’s debut poetry collection Come Home Alive, was published by Burning Eye Books, September 2018. Its racy cover was immediately banned on Facebook! The collection is available in all bookshops. "Penny Pepper's work is a virtuoso display of wit, invention and courage. It's thought provoking and funny and moving and makes us see the world differently" - Dame Margaret Drabble. Penny’s recent memoir charts her punky coming of age and creative journey in the Thatcher years and beyond. First in the World Somewhere is published in hardback by Unbound and launched at The Royal Festival Hall. The actor/activist Liz Carr praised its wit and candour when she chose it as her personal pick on Radio 4’s ‘A Good Read’ in October 2018. Penny also guests regularly as a columnist for The Guardian and other titles.

Who Can Write Disability? commissioned by Spread the Word

THINK

I’m a writer, I am – despite the earliest unhelpful pronouncements that I would never succeed. As a council house kid from a working class background it wasn’t the done thing. And to make it extra hard for myself, from my beginnings I acknowledged my own experience of disability within my work.

I got slapped down further because no-one wants to read about that, cripples and ill people, do they? They didn’t in the 70’s but punk lit a fire under my arse and inside my heart, illuminating my thoughts that flew as poems to endless fanzines. No one cared on those pages if I raged about the injustice that surrounded my life, that as a wheelchair user I faced barriers at every turn. Those days were fun and fierce, and gave me a safe, welcome arena in which to learn my craft and meet like-minded people. This also led me into the beginnings of the radical disability arts movement in the mid 80’s. It was here I started to earn a bit of money from my words, where I could write about the disability experience in a way that the mainstream still did not accept.