Deep Wheel Orcadia

Winner of the 2022 Arthur C Clarke Award

By: Harry Josephine Giles

Narrated by: Harry Josephine Giles

Please note, this audio edition alternates between sections written and performed in the Orkney dialect, and their English translations.

Astrid is returning home from art school on Mars, looking for inspiration. Darling is fleeing a life that never fit, searching for somewhere to hide. They meet on Deep Wheel Orcadia, a distant space station struggling for survival as the pace of change threatens to leave the community behind.

Deep Wheel Orcadia is a magical first: a science-fiction verse-novel written in the Orkney dialect. This unique adventure in minority language poetry is followed by a parallel translation into playful and vivid English, so the listener will miss no nuance of the original. The rich and varied cast weaves a compelling, lyric and effortlessly readable story around place and belonging, work and economy, generation and gender politics, love and desire – all with the lightness of touch, fluency and musicality one might expect of one the most talented poets to have emerged from Scotland in recent years. Hailing from Orkney, Harry Josephine Giles is widely known as a fine poet and spellbindingly original performer of their own work; Deep Wheel Orcadia now strikes out into audacious new space.

Critic reviews

A symphony o yotuns, peedie suns and langships tae Mars, in Deep Wheel Orcadia Harry Josephine Giles hauds the starns in the loof o thier haun, terraformin new warlds in Scots. (A symphony of giants, miniature suns and longships to Mars, in Deep Wheel Orcadia Harry Josephine Giles holds the stars in the palm of their hand, terraforming new worlds in Scots.) (Matthew Fitt)

Deep Wheel Orcadia is a mysterious and moving novel in verse about finding home in the farthest reaches. Giles lifts us to new worlds, in space and in language, we could never have imagined. A singular and numinous work (Morgan M Page)

I can't remember the last time I was this beguiled, this engrossed and this inspired by a book. It's like nothing else I've ever read. It was a joy to feel so entranced by the possibilities and complexities of each and every word. Harry Josephine Giles is a true original and a vital voice – don't miss this. (Kirsty Logan)

Voice did me in

Nails on a chalkboard voice, slow in the standard English, and the dialect is the fast part. Could not get past five minutes and I’ve read Look Homeward Angel. Please don’t take it personally author, but try another actor.

Hard to understand narrator

I understand this book won the Arthur C Clark Arawak for 2022. It may be a good book but don’t bother with the audiobook version unless you easily understand the dialect/accent of the narrator. I can hardly understand her. It doesn’t sound like English most of the time.