Penny Pepper at Little Gate Festival
Just outside Hastings there’s a neat little festival brewing up some top family fun alongside a handful of amazing local bands – for Little Gate Big Festival. This the organisers are stepping away from Farm Sunday and holding a festival. On Friday 7th and Saturday 8th June, they will be celebrating the hard work of Little Gate Farm, the lives and achievements of the people they work with! There will be food, drink, live music, live performances and plenty of children’s activities. Den building, meeting the animals, stories in the sensory garden and a woodland trail. This year the farm is excited to offer camping at the beautiful farm.
ABOUT PENNY PEPPER "Why am I The Naked Punk?
Punk is my raw beginning. It saw my writing find a raging home in early fanzines. Punk fired a freedom in me to start accepting myself, that I was OK as a human being, as a woman, as a creative, who could challenge the categories imposed upon me.
Punk is the energy that triggered my activism, and my passion for social justice and equality.
I’m Naked because I strive to be open in my writing, to show what needs to be shown. Stories that strip away stereotype and expectation, stories that you’ve not heard before, because we’ve been barred from that privileged club for so long. My stories subvert and maybe challenge, in the same way I provoke when I’ve posed naked – literally – for artists and photographers, and when I’ve performed burlesque. To draw an audience into a nakedness, to share the fun and the message: accept yourself, accept a new story.
Sometimes it’s good to know when I’m too naked. When the challenges we all face conspire to make us vulnerable and forgetful of protecting ourselves. I don’t want to be in this space. No one should, and we can find compassion for ourselves and each other to not let this happen. Naked is always a choice.
As The Naked Punk, I’ll always be on this bumpy journey. I don’t have answers and it’s not easy – but through my work I’ll enjoy sharing punky naked questions along the way.”
"Penny Pepper's work is a virtuoso display of wit, invention and courage. It's thought provoking and funny and moving and makes us see the world differently" - Dame Margaret Drabble.
A genre-defying and versatile writer, Penny Pepper’s work is a mixture of the quirky and the lewd, with a focus on the examination of difference and identity.
An acclaimed author, performer and activist, Penny’s debut poetry collection Come Home Alive, was published by Burning Eye Books, September 2018. Its racy cover was immediately banned on Facebook!
Penny’s recent memoir charts her punky coming of age and creative journey in the Thatcher years and beyond. First in the World Somewhere is published in hardback by Unbound and launched at The Royal Festival Hall. The actor/activist Liz Carr praised its wit and candour when she chose it as her personal pick on Radio 4’s ‘A Good Read’ in October 2018.
Penny wrote the taboo-breaking short story collection, Desires Reborn in 2012 and won a Creative Futures Literary Award shortly after.
In 2014 her one-woman spoken word show, Lost in Spaces, premiered to strong reviews at Soho Theatre. Penny also guests regularly as a columnist for The Guardian and Huffington Post. As a dynamic performance poet, she gigs across the UK, including London, Edinburgh and further afield in New York.