Gillian K Ferguson is an award-winning poet whose work has been described as dazzlingly original, luminous and boldly intelligent; combining vivid lyricism and sensuality with a particularly acute ‘Celtic’ sensibility to nature.
Most recently, she won the £25,000 Creative Scotland Award, presented by the Scottish Arts Council, for her project on the Human Genome – ‘The Human Genome: Poems on the Book of Life’. The book – in four ‘Sequences’ - is a major poetic exploration of the mapping of the ‘Human Genome’, the entire genetic code of three billion letters required to create a human being. A particular focus of the work is Comparative Genomics - the increasing realisation of profound genetic similarities among all living organisms. It is a magnum opus on genetics, spanning a thousand pages of poems and poetic reflection interwoven with extracts from academic papers, interviews, newspaper reports and books.
Her previous book of poems was the groundbreaking volume, ‘Baby: Poems on Pregnancy, Birth and Babies’ (Canongate, and in the US, Grove Atlantic) – the first book of poems to chart the whole experience of becoming a mother. In a unique initiative with a high street chain, the book is now published by GAP and available in flagship BabyGAP stores. This accords with the author’s passionate belief in reaching the public with ‘real’ poetry.
Courtesy of "The Human Genome" Site.