Penny Simpson is an author, fundraiser, researcher, and creative health practitioner. Her writing and her creative research projects have been commissioned and funded by a range of organisations, including the BBC, British Council, NHS and Arts Council Wales.
Penny’s publications include two novels, The Banquet of Esther Rosenbaum and The Deer Wedding, and DOGdays, a collection of short stories. Her short fiction has appeared in many anthologies and literary journals including Best of European Fiction, Mslexia, Short Fiction Journal and The Lonely Crowd. Recent short fiction has been long-listed for the 2024 Desperate Literature Prize for Short Fiction, Highly Commended in the 2023 Bath Short Story Award and long listed for the 2021 V.S. Pritchett Short Story Award. Awards and grants include an Arts Council of Wales New Writers Bursary and Hawthornden Fellowship. She was awarded an AHRC/CHASE-DTP scholarship for her PhD in Creative Writing.
Since 2023, Penny has been building a new strand to her creative practice, developing creative health initiatives in collaboration with organisations in the cultural and public health sectors. The starting point was The House of Dreams and Memories, an innovative creative writing workshop programme funded by NHS Wales and Arts Council of Wales . The workshops were inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s idea of space as a ‘geography of echoes.’ In 2023-2024, Penny delivered the programme to NHS patients living with chronic pain and long-term health conditions supported by WISE (Wellness Improvement Service) in the South Wales Valleys.
In 2025-2026, Penny is adapting The House of Dreams and Memories for Home-Start Essex’s Thriving Communities project, a creative and wellbeing initiative for families with children under five. Thriving Communities is funded by South East Essex Alliance Health Inequalities Fund.
She has also created and received funding for Writing with Images, a programme of three inter-linked creative writing workshops exploring the application of visual arts techniques to the writing of literature. The workshops are inspired by the life and work of Modernist Polish writer and poet Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska and will draw on archival materials held in the Special Collections at the University of Essex. The workshops are free and will be open to members of the public (over 18), as well as university staff and students. They will take place on the Colchester campus in April, May and June, 2026.
