Award-winning poet Ailsa Holland published her first pamphlet, Twenty-Four Miles Up, in 2017 with support from Arts Council England. Ailsa's poems have appeared in anthologies including The Tree Line (2017) and MAP: Poems After William Smith's Geological Map of 1815 (2015) and journals such as The Rialto, Under the Radar, Bare Fiction and 3: AM. Ailsa was Artist-in-Residence for Macclesfield's Barnaby Festival in 2016; she has collaborated with artists' Studio Twentyseven on several exhibitions including How Did It Get So Dark? (2018-19). Ailsa is co-creator of the feminist history Twitter project @OnThisDayShe and co-author of On This Day She: Putting Women Back Into History, One Day At A Time (2021). She is Director of Moormaid Press.
'What a thing of beauty this collection is. Traversing time and landscape, Ailsa Holland throws words like clay, to be cast in the heart and mind, to be treasured.' - Abi Morgan 'This collection is full of love for the places that made Ailsa Holland the woman she is, and acknowledgement of the forces that constrain and free us all.' - Jo Bell 'Ailsa Holland's The Bodleian and the Bottle Ovens is as methodologically daring as it is charming, personal, witty and incisive. We can smell the burning here and it is a city, and a jug.' - Steven J Fowler