About

"Benefica. Medicinal magic. This is what we experience as we enter Rebecca Sharp's Long Field Loop. A work so kitchen table intimate that, reading it, we feel intimately connected, warming our cold edges among a circle of friends that includes humans, geodes, birch trees, otters, and peat. Sharp's is the warmest kind of magic. Long Field Loop is more than a book, it's an invitation to a party. Beyond the river and through the canyon together we enter a circle of pine. When the morning comes, and we return home, Sharp presses into our hands a party favor, a warding charm, a sacred reminder, we depart from this book knowing, as she says so insistently, we still want to be here." (Amanda Yates Garcia, author of Initiated: Memoir of a Witch, host of the Between the Worlds podcast)

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"Long Field Loop is a cosmos channelled through the rhizomatic structure of everything everywhere all at once. Intimate and expansive, inventive, expressive, this is poetry as a (re)search for meaning and honest implication; and the reader is folded directly into its eco-poiesis. Financial futures and pine needles, tapirs, blanket bog, sea otters, and prehistoric star-gazing parties; Sharp animates the academic with vibrant interconnection and offers new patterns of thought and practice across any imagined divide." (Samuel Tongue)

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"fascinatingly complex, audacious and at times brain-poppingly clever work" (Neil Cooper, Herald Scotland)

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b. 1979, Glasgow, Scotland

Rebecca Sharp is a writer and interdisciplinary artist whose work encompasses poetry, plays and performance; in spoken-word, installation, and print; collaborative and participatory projects.

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Based in Fife, Scotland. In 2022-2024 she was the inaugural Artist in Residence with the Centre for Energy Ethics (CEE) at the University of St Andrews, supported by Creative Scotland and the CEE, researching and writing the poetry collection Long Field Loop (Tapsalteerie 2024). 

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In 2020 she received a Literature Matters Award from the Royal Society of Literature to write the poetry pamphlet collection Rough Currency (Tapsalteerie 2021), exploring our various entanglements with fossil fuels and the oil economy. A preview selection of the poems won 2nd Prize in The Art of Energy Awards 2021 (Centre for Energy Ethics, University of St Andrews).

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Other poetry includes: Notes for a Traveller (2021 Souterrain Press), visual poetry installation commissioned for KIOSK - An Lanntair; THIS (2020, with Steve Smart) - Finalist in the Brush & Lyre Prize for Multimedia Poetry, commissioned by StAnza Poetry Festival and Book Week Scotland; Unmapped (2013), exhibition and publication of poems and paintings with artist Anna King; and The Ballad of Juniper Davy and Sonny Lumiere (2010), publication and performances with artist Elizabeth Willow and METAL Liverpool. In 2016 she was Poet-Perfumer in Residence with StAnza Poetry Festival, where she created the site-specific installation of poems and perfume blends Five Charms for the Potingair. From this she created a limited edition box-set of the same name (containing the poems with vials of perfume -"irresistible", Times Literary Supplement); and developed Poetry Apothecary - a participatory workshop combining poetry-writing with perfume-blending, which ran from 2016-2020. 

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Plays include Last Child (Arches theatre, Glasgow 2001 and HERE Arts Center, NYC 2002); Danger: Hollow Sidewalk (Arches theatre, 2006); The Wakeful Chamber (A Play, A Pie & A Pint/Sound Festival - Lemon Tree, Aberdeen and Oran Mor, Glasgow 2015); and The Air That Carries The Weight (Traverse theatre, Stellar Quines theatre company - Edinburgh 2016). Other work for performance includes: For the Bees (with Mr McFall’s Chamber); The Unmaking of Mary Somerville (Stellar Quines theatre company and Scottish National Portrait Gallery); and Rules of the Moon (with sound artist Philip Jeck – The Bluecoat, Liverpool and Hidden Door Festival, Edinburgh). 

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She has received funding awards from Creative Scotland, Arts Council England, Society of Authors, Tom McGrath Trust, Playwrights' Studio Scotland, Gaelic Books Council, and the Royal Society of Literature. She has held residencies with a range of organisations including METAL Liverpool, Edge Hill University, the Bothy Project, Creative Carbon Scotland, and StAnza: Scotland’s International Poetry Festival. She regularly reads at poetry and literature events and festivals throughout Scotland and the UK, and in 2017 represented Scotland at the International Poetry Festival of Nicaragua in Granada. 

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She gained early teaching experience at the University of Glasgow, and later through association with The Windows Project in Liverpool. She continues to lead innovative workshops and participatory projects, independently and in partnership with a wide range of community groups, schools, HE institutions, arts and cultural organisations. She has been a past Trustee of Scottish PEN; and is an Affiliate Member of the Centre for Energy Ethics (University of St Andrews). She is a professional member of the Society of Authors, Scottish PEN, Lapidus International, the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society, Scottish Society of Playwrights, the Federation of Writers Scotland, and the Scottish Book Trust Live Literature database.

 

She co-runs Platform Poetry events in Fife; and co-runs Souterrain Press, for the occasional production of increasingly niche projects.

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