Penny Pepper has led an extraordinary life. She is a writer, an activist, a punk pioneer. She also happens to be disabled. In her absorbing memoir, Penny paints a raucous picture of life, love, music and misadventure, from Thatcher’s battleground of the mid-1980s through to the early Blair years.
Craving freedom from the home counties council estate where she grew up, Penny dreams of moving to London and finding her way in the city’s punk scene. Without what others take for granted, she sets out armed only with her raw, burgeoning talent to fight the social demons of indifference and bigotry, all while dressed in leather bondage skirts, fishnets and hair extensions.
There are parties; there’s sex; there’s music. She exchanges letters with Morrissey. Ken Livingstone helps her find a wheelchair-accessible flat. Her demo tape is reviewed in the NME and played on the radio. Her album Spiral Sky is No. 1 in Greece for a week. And there is opportunity – to join the radical beginnings of the disability rights movement.
First in the World Somewhere is the chronicle of her passions and her struggles, told with startling honesty and a razor-sharp wit, fearless in the face of prejudice.
About the author
Penny Pepper is a writer, poet and well-known rights activist. She writes regularly for the Guardian and has appeared on Newsnight, Sky News, BBC Radio 5 Live and Radio 4’s Today programme.
Her explicit, taboo-breaking book about sex and disabled people, Desires Reborn, was published in 2012, and in 2013 she won a Creative Future Literary Award. In 2014 her one-woman show, Lost in Spaces, premiered at the Soho Theatre before going on a successful UK tour. She has also performed in Oxford, Edinburgh and New York.
She is currently finishing work on a novel and her first collection of poetry. She lives in London.
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