Apart from sharing a passion for creative teaching, and the particular landscape of Shetland, Jen Hadfield and I share a love of limpets. It is with great delight that I present you with Storm Pegs: Book review as the Shetland Text and Texture bookart workshop 2026 goes on sale.

Jen Hadfield is an extraordinary poet – the youngest female to be awarded the T.S. Eliot prize in 2008 – exploring place, landscape, the space between words. She began writing ‘Storm Pegs: A Life Made in Shetland’ as a series of connected essays, striving to describe her eighteen years of island life in three hundred pages.

Somehow she does, with a depth of awareness held lightly. Comparing writing to building a dyke, choosing one word, one stone, at a time.

Out on a boat, so close to the sea, rendering familiar landscapes strange, Hadfield watches the water: ‘Texture is how she expresses herself.’ Such detailed noticing.

Way back in 2013 we co-tutored a Poetry and Bookart course with Arvon, at Lumb Bank. Following a midweek visit from Richard Long, the group was inspired to apply landscape to paper – I hold a ruby memory of Jen crushing wild berries to dye the page, juice and seeds dripping from her hands.

Storm Pegs: A Life Made in Shetland, by Jen Hadfield, published by Picador.

Read an excellent interview with Glasgow Review of Books here, where James Taylor describes how Hadfield’s debut prose ‘sings like a fiddle and blasts like a gale’.

To buy your paperback copy (pictured below) from Golden Hare Books with a 10% discount, use code bookbinderbookreview51 valid until 27th November 2025.