"Deep Wheel Orcadia is a far future space station almost but not entirely unlike Orkney, my home. It is a peripheral place, once central to imperial expansion, finding a way to persist through ecological and economic crises. Astrid, a station-born artist, returns from Mars and no longer knows her place; Darling, a Martian, looks for home in Orcadia and finds something else. They meet, they orbit each other, time turns. The story of people and place is told in vignettes, Orkney and English, spinning a fantasy of what worlds might be and what words are."
Harry Josephine Giles is from Orkney and lives in Leith. Their poetry collections The Games (Out-Spoken 2018) and Tonguit (Freight 2015) were between them shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Saltire Prize and the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. They have a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Stirling. Their 2019 performance Drone debuted in the Made in Scotland Showcase at the Edinburgh Fringe and toured internationally, and their 2013 performance What We Owe was a Guardian best-of-the-Fringe – in the “But Is It Art?” category. Deep Wheel Orcadia is an Orkney language science fiction verse novel, published by Picador in October 2021 and selected as a PBS Winter Recommendation.