Paula Jennings

Jennings worked with poetry students, tutoring individually and in poetry writing workshops, including Open Studies at Edinburgh University.

For a number of years Jennings ran sessions with people living with dementia, using poetry in creative communication and sometimes making collaborative poems that speak vividly of living in other dimensions. The poems in her third collection, Under a Spell Place (HappenStance Press) celebrated the resourceful and lyrical language of a woman with advanced dementia. They have generated discussion in events organised by the Royal College of Nursing, The Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival (sponsored by StAnza), Lapidus Scotland, Luminate, and Dundee Literary Festival.

More recently she has become interested in how we as people from diverse cultures express our being in the natural world through the arts; one of the themes for her fourth collection. A final collection of poetry, This is You, Dear Stranger, was published by Red Squirrel Press in May 2024.

Paula Jennings was diagnosed with a brain tumour in late 2023 and died on 7th June 2024.

Her friend, Helena Nelson, commented: “This book is something to be proud of, something that will endure. It doesn’t address the experience of brain cancer. It was assembled before the poet had that diagnosis. But Paula has always been a magical person. Her poems are prescient in their evocation of the shadowy margin between the living and the dead, between this world and the next. At times that prescience is eerie.”