Penny Simpson is a writer, researcher, and creative facilitator. 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 of 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 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 adapted The House of Dreams and Memories for Home-Start Essex’s Thriving Communities project, a creative and wellbeing initiative for families in challenging circumstances. Thriving Communities was funded by South East Essex Alliance Health Inequalities Fund.
Penny is currently devising new programmes of creative writing workshops under the umbrella title Writing with Images exploring the application of visual arts techniques to writing fiction and non-fiction. Writing with Images was launched in Spring 2026 with a programme inspired by the life and work of Modernist Polish writer and poet Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska and drew on archival materials held in the Special Collections at the University of Essex.
Publications forthcoming include an essay on the fiction of Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington in The Edinburgh Companion to Place and Space in Interwar Women’s Writing in English from University of Edinburgh Press (March 2027).
