First in the World Somewhere

Penny Pepper

Sep 2017 · Unbound Publishing

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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.

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Penny Pepper is a genre-defying writer and well-known rights activist. She wrote the taboo-breaking book Desires Reborn in 2012, and in 2013 she won a Creative Futures Literary Award. In 2014 her one-woman spoken word show, Lost in Spaces, premiered to strong reviews at Soho Theatre, and then toured in autumn 2015. She has appeared as a guest on the Victoria Derbyshire show, Newsnight, Sky News and BBC Radio5Live Hitlist. She has written columns for the Guardian and Access magazine and a blog for Mslexia magazine.