September 2025
My new short story The gift has been published as story of the month by The Lonely Crowd. Inspired by a hot-desking arts studio space in Cardiff, the story is about a friendship struck up between an asylum seeker and a book artist. You can read it here:
https://thelonelycrowd.org/2025/09/19/short-story-of-the-month-the-gift-by-penny-simpson/
June 2025
The University of Essex has published a news story about my creative research project with Home-Start Essex. It’s great to hear how it’s benefiting participants and partners engaged with the project, and even better, more to come! A new series of workshops is underway and runs until late July. As the report states, creative writing can help improve families mental health through giving opportunities to play, create and to tell the stories which matter most.
https://www.essex.ac.uk/news/2025/06/05/creative-writing-home-start-essex
February 2025
A new commission for 2025-2026 begins this month delivering creative writing workshops for the Thriving Communities project run by Home-Start Essex. My online workshops will form part of the Happy Healthy Families programme. Home-Start Essex is a wonderful organisation providing support for families and this year they’ve received funding from South East Essex Health Alliance Inequalities Fund to set up some new activities including my creative writing workshops. I can’t wait to get started. I’ll be developing a programme of workshops I originally ran for an NHS social prescribing project in Wales in 2023 and 2024 called The House of Dreams and Memories. My involvement with Home-Start Essex came about after I attended a speed networking event organised by the Research Enterprise Office at the University of Essex bringing together academics and professionals working in the health and care sectors. It was a great event and it’s inspired a new direction for my creative research practice in Essex. Image: Lucy Grinter.
July 2024
My article on Ali Smith’s wonderful Seasonal Quartet has just been published by C21 Literature Journal of 21st century Writings. I discuss why I think Smith’s quartet of novels reads like an oral collage, and I explore in detail her creation of four distinctive voices, those of the storyteller-migrants who challenge media stereotypes through their acts of creative resistance. You can read more here: https://c21.openlibhums.org/article/id/8613/
June 2024
The House of Dreams and Memories is back! I will be running my creative writing workshops for WISE (Wellness Improvement Service) in Cwm Taf Morgannwg over July and August. Inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s idea of space as a ‘geography of echoes,’ participants will be creating their very own house of dreams and memories. We begin with the basic structure of attic, cellar and stairway and take it from there. This year, we’ll also be creating and customising Story Coats and designing secret caskets. The workshops are aimed at people living with long-term health problems and chronic pain and are funded by NHS Cymru/Arts Council Wales. The first series of workshops ran as part of the WISE programme last spring and were a real joy to deliver. Looking forward to working with a new group this year.
December 2023
My short story The Owl Tamer has been Highly Commended in the Bath Short Story Award competition. I’m really chuffed about this. Unusually for me, its written in the second person. The story is set in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina and centres on the relationship between two characters: a mute who is an owl tamer and a ceramicist who has returned to her village after living in exile. Both are drawn into the search for the missing. The judge was Farhana Shaikh of Dahlia Publishing. More on the award winners and other shortlistees (is this even a word?!) at: https://www.bathshortstoryaward.org/2023/07/31/winners-bath-short-story-award-2023/
September 2023
In September, I presented at the International Creative Bridges Conference, a gathering of academics, health specialists and creative practitioners involved in bringing the arts into health and wellbeing initiatives. I discussed The House of Dreams and Memories, a series of creative writing workshops I devised and ran for NHS patients living with long-term health problems and chronic pain. The workshops took place in Spring 2023 as part of the interdisciplinary WISE Wellbeing Project run by Cwm Taf Morgannwg-University Health Board, co-funded by NHS Wales and Arts Council Wales. My talk was titled ‘Geography of echoes: narrating experiences of pain and loss.’
April 2023
Excited to have a new short story out in April in Short Fiction Journal. ‘Winter’s map’ is a story about friendship and survival, with a stunning illustration by Conor Fenner-Toora. You can read it here:
https://www.shortfictionjournal.co.uk/post/winter-s-map-penny-simpson
December 2022
I have an article out in Literature Interpretation Theory Journal which explores the writing of Surrealist Leonora Carrington and Dubravka Ugresic. Carrington’s Down Below (1944) and Ugresic’s The Ministry of Pain (2006) are two books which have long fascinated me. Why? Because both writers interweave visual art techniques into their creative writing to generate new narrative possibilities. You can read my article ‘Breaking the Frame: The Role of Artmaking in Narratives of Migration and Diaspora‘ here:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10436928.2022.2100667
In spring 2023, I will be designing and running a series of creative writing workshops for Cwm Taf Morgannwg University Health Board’s newly launched Wellness Improvement Service (WISE).
WISE will encourage and support patients to take control of their own health, including the management of chronic pain and other long-term conditions. As part of the service, they will have the opportunity to take part in a series of creative workshops organised in partnership with the Health Board’s Arts and Performance Department. In my creative writing workshops, participants will be invited to design and ‘build’ a House of Dreams and Memories. Inspired by Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, the workshops will take a playful and creative look at the spaces which nurture and renew us.
June 2022
In June 2022, I discussed my research for a new creative non-fiction project at the Bearing Untold Stories conference organised by the Department of English and Creative Writing at University of Lancaster. This new work is partly inspired by the life and work of the German Jewish emigre artist Eva Frankfurther (1930-1959). Unattached to any major artistic group or movement, Frankfurther chose to live and work close to those she painted in the Whitechapel district of London, including her friends from the West Indian community.