Writers and Artist John Rae and the Northern Telegraph Route

Fleur Ward

Fleur Ward  originally from Melbourne, Australia, relocated to Orkney to undertake the MLitt Orkney and Shetland Studies. In 2025 she gained her PhD entitled “Exploratory mapping of digital connectivity and island governance: a comparative study of the Scottish archipelagos and Irish islands” in the discipline of Island Studies. She is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and a member of the International Small Island Studies Association.

Fleur presented her paper The Northern Route: Dr John Rae and the telegraph at the University of the Highlands and Islands’ 6th International St. Magnus Conference in April 2024 in Shetland. This formed the inspiration for Nordic Viola’s project.

Lesley Harrison

Lesley Harrison lives in a village on the Angus coastline. Her writing takes place among the soundscapes, migration routes, relics and settlements of the North Atlantic rim, and asks how our experience of these is thinned or altered in this age of sudden change. The whale, a half-fabulous, transient creature, recurs throughout her writing as a reminder of the real proximity of the marvellous, and of the very frail ecologies of our lived world. Her most recent collection, Kitchen Music, was published simultaneously in the UK by Carcanet and the USA by New Directions. One Bird Flying (Mariscat), a sequence following part of the journeys of Marco Polo, was written while she worked in Mongolia; the pamphlet collection Blue Pearl (New Directions) was written during residencies in Greenland and Svalbard, the furthest reach of our North Sea whaling fleet. In her prose she considers the craft of writing a poetry which captures, rather than overwrites, the textures and voices of its place of origin.

Sarah Barnard

Sarah Barnard was commissioned by Nordic Viola to create our image for this project of “The Fox” – the ship used on this expedition.Sarah is a polar exploration obsessive who makes art for adventurous people. She has sailed around Svalbard on a wooden tallship and done polar expedition training. She runs the Polar Artists Collective, the Polar Book Club, and Expedition Gallery, She is artist in residence at the Explorer’s Club Great Britain and Ireland, and has worked with the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, Discovery Point, Shackleton Museum (Shackleton Autumn School), and Antarctic Heritage Trust NZ. She is inspired by stories of people doing incredible things in cold places.