Penny Pepper

What is Counterculture? – It’s an alternative lifestyle... – The ideas that spark a revolution... – A movement that changes the world... This new collection of essays celebrates the incredible originality of British post-war culture. British art, film, theatre, dance, literature and music have attracted international recognition, from the Angry Young Men to the Sex Pistols to Grayson Perry. Now gaming, the internet and social media enable creative communities to flourish and either fight for social justice – or just be entertained. Can we find the creative inspiration to succeed in a postcapitalist future?

What are the real and metaphorical places we do battle in? How are the barriers of the heart and the stone challenged when you are defined as `Other'? Come Home Alive is Penny Pepper's debut poetry collection. It reflects a diversity of thought and emotion, resonating with her signature combination of compassion, wit and protest. This collection gathers together some of her most successful live pieces including the protest of London Bus, the anthemic Cripplegate Town, and the spit of outrage in Special. Penny's work has been described as euphoric melancholic, reflected in poems such as Sonnet for Blues and Rain.

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.