Storm Pegs: A Life Made in Shetland

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From the winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Highland Book Prize What if the answer to 'Where am I' is 'heaven' In her late twenties, celebrated poet Jen Hadfield moved to the Shetland archipelago to make her life anew. A scattering of islands at the northernmost point of the United Kingdom, frequently cut off from the mainland by storms, Shetland is a place of Vikings and myths, of ancient languages and old customs, of breathtaking landscapes and violent weather. It has long fascinated travellers seeking the edge of the world. On these islands known for their isolation and drama, Hadfield found something more: a place teeming with life, where rare seabirds blow in on Atlantic gales, seals and dolphins visit its beaches, and wild folk festivals carry the residents through long, dark winters. She found a close-knit community, too, of neighbours always willing to lend a boat or build a creel, of women wild-swimming together in the star-spangled winter seas. Over seventeen years, as bright summer nights gave way to storm-lashed winters, she learned new ways to live. In prose as rich and magical as Shetland itself, Storm Pegs transports us to the islands as a local; introducing us to the remote and beautiful archipelago where Hadfield has made her home, and shows us new ways of living at the edge.

Reviews

Storm Pegs perfectly captures the knotting of language and landscape. I was transported. -- Katherine May,Sunday Timesbestselling author ofWintering
Storm Pegs is rich, attentive and beautifully written. Hadfield writes vividly about the tides, the Shaetlan language, and shows a great appreciation for the people and modern life of Shetland. This book has been my friend. I really loved it and I recommend it -- Amy Liptrot, author of The Outrun
Storm Pegs is a deeply thoughtful and beautifully written account of a life centred on making art in a lively island community. Hadfield writes with rare nuance about choosing and building a new life in a place that calls to many of us. -- Sarah Moss, author of Summerwater
Delightful: at once intricate and effortless, playful and deeply felt. A heartfelt paean to a coldwater Eden. -- Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment
What a wonderful book. Jen Hadfield just has to turn her languaged gaze to the world and it fizzes to life on the page. One of the most intensely realised accounts of a place - and time in a place - I have read. -- Philip Marsden,author ofThe Summer Isles
A gorgeous portrait of a fascinating, ever-changing place, as well as very many other things: friendship, community, creation and self-creation, the cycle of the seasons and the toil and triumph of the elements. I adored it. -- Sara Baume, author ofA Line Made By Walking
This book is brim-full of love for Shetland for its land and seascapes, for its people and language. Hadfields writing is fuelled by unceasing curiosity and attentiveness. It is vivid, lively and fresh -- Malachy Tallack, author of Sixty Degrees North
In this memoir, written after seventeen years living in this wild, wonderful place, Hadfield reflects on her pristine but often brutal surroundings, where seals and dolphins nose up to the beaches and residents enjoy wild swimming through wintry seas. -- GQ, The best books of 2024
Storm Pegs is as much an account of the author finding new personal bearings as a series of magic lantern slides about insular life . . . This is a great, bright birl of a book thoroughly beguiling. * The Spectator *
Hadfield paints Shetland vividly as a place ever-changing. Storm Pegs is a powerful hymn to Shetland and to community, as well as to the awesomeness of nature. This is a bewitching book, tactile and immersive, riven with salt winds, alive with human oddities and loud with the cries of seabirds. Everything glows in the light of Hadfields words, from slimy sea molluscs to grand island vistas. * The Telegraph *

Author Bio

Jen Hadfield lives in Shetland. Her first collection Almanacs won an Eric Gregory Award in 2003. Her second collection Nigh-No-Place won the T. S. Eliot Prize and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. She won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Competition in 2012. Her collection The Stone Age won the Highland Book Prize in 2022, and she is also a recipient of the Windham Campbell Prize 2024.