Gemma Cairney

Here she is. Out of the sea. I think this might be the official cover reveal of a part of my heart, a life changing labour of love and realisation. I'm uncomfortable with a hard sell, but it's a true joy to introduce you all the same, I believe in the investment of books. A last bastion of queit empowerment and reclaimation of intimate wonder. I hope The Immortal Sisterhood finds it's way to being held by you. @waterstones are running a special 'coming soon' offer. Which means you can get 25% off if you pre-order using the code: FEB26 Though GET ON IT, as the deal ends at midnight tonight. The link is in my bio. T&C's apply. The illustration is Sea Creatures by the inimitable Sister: Pamela Colman Smith aka Pixie, c. 1907 🩵🩵🩵🩵🩵🩵💚💚💙💙💙🩵🩵🩵💚💚💚💙🩵🩵 #TheImmortalSisterhood in love.

I keep thinking about our SISTXRHOOD, the womxn of past, present and future. The things those of the past must have seen, how so much of it was silenced. How much of the abomination of slavery was organised and backed up by governements and people of power. How much of those years of new world empire and force and colonisation impacted the memories held in all of our DNA regardless of ethnicity. How it was always womxn and children at the hands of the most violent effects of it all. I think about catharsis and healing and how the rage imbued in some of the art acts not only as a reminder but as a portal of timeless solidarity and strength. I think about how many womxn I know who are making ground breaking work and it's not platformed or resourced. I think about the mothers who are trying to find rest and heal and protect in the horrific onslaught of truth. I think about the day I went to the place Nina Simone was born. Archive Post from December 2024: Today I went out to the birthplace of Eunice Waymon. In the small hilly town of Tyron, North Carolina with streets that had names that match some of those in Scotland. I thought of the young black girl who in the mid to late 1930s showed a remarkable excellence for piano playing at the early age of just four years old. Set backs, travel, false starts and a name change followed, yet Nina Simone went on to be revered as one of the most prolific composers, jazz musicians, singer & songwriters of all time. Campaigning in so many of the fibres of her work relentlessly, for civil rights. In the small quiet residential place, full of browns and greens where the gift of her life began I felt moved in the golden light of the sun and the drifting smell of pine. I stood in her first backyard and stared at the roots of the big tree that stood majestic, I willed it to talk to me so I could understand why I felt so teary in my awe and wonder for her perseverance. Thank you so much for everything Nina, none of it was wasted on so many of us, least of all me and my new friend the thriving Magnolia tree. #TheImmortalSisterhood

☆archive post☆ It's been a lush flurry of commUNITY & chat. Please subscribe to links in my bio to keep an eye on updates of upcoming 'n exciting work. ☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ Hiya, I'm back pon radio on Sunday. It's a show rooted in LOVE in all it's forms & @ocean_vuong will be joining us to talk about love / writing / music and other great deep things. We'll also be joined in the swirl by Avant Garde performers @juliamasli 'n @paulinalenoir ... Come join us on @bbc6music from 10am on the 31st to see out August together. ❤️🏳️‍🌈🌎🌍🌀🔥🎇♥️🧡💕💌❤️🎼🪕📻

WOOOOOOOIIIII OIIIIIIIII! HAPPY FRIDAY! 💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜 @bookshop_org_uk are offering 20% off The Immortal Sisterhood, if you pre-order by the end of Sunday! Just use the code: PREORDER20 OH AND... If you DM me a screen grab of your order confirmation I'll personally send you a link to the special Sisterhood Rythmns Playlist I've made 💜💜💜💜💜💜 It's over 2 hours of deep tunage of all genres and made up of lots of songs that are mentioned in, or inspired some of the writing. IMMERSE YERSELF IN THE POETICS. Get the book AND the soundtrack. Link in bio... Go, go. Go, GO, go forth. #TheImmortalSisterhood T&C's Apply.

Last night @canongatebooks 's 2026 Showcase, we were all lucky enough to hear about lots of very exciting new books....... Including @tahmima Anam's epic new novel - UPRISING - about a group of trafficked women trapped on a violent island, who rise up and plan escape. At one point she said how we may not live to see a real revolution in our lifetime... Though I would argue that we kinda are?! It's essence is in women writers congregating, books like ours, the powerful imaginations of our readers... & astonishingly good ties. I have woken up even more IN LOVE WITH BOOKS. Please join me in a reading revolution!? #TheImmortalSisterhood P.s LOVELY to meet everyone who came & thank you to the stupendously fab poet and broadcaster @misspunnypennie for hosting. I am in awe of you all.

If there's one thing I know about it, it's escaping. On the day of the local elections we got up first thing, voted and then drove to from Edinburgh all the way to Gloucestershire in search of an injection of new nature and inspiration... a reminder that we could wake up and plunge our tired bodies into a wood fired hot tub... We could even live on stilts and look at all things green and bunny rabbits hopping about the place, we really could. Thank you for hosting our night of rest 'n digest @canopyandstars , you lot are MY ABSOLUTE FAVE for these moments. Honestly, head to their website for runaways that have secret swimming holes, shepherd's huts in a fairy bell woods, yurts, treehouses and other locations of our tranquility-yearning-imaginations-made-reality; There's such peaceful and astonishing beauty on there, that if it was a letting agent we would have tried to rent one of the spots for a year's contract by now. We will live off grid one day. We will. When was your last escape? 💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚

What's it like to write a book? For me it's been an experience of elastic time, where falling madly in love with nature, playing with the written word, listening to dreams, paying respect to the ancestors, becoming a mother, & challenging myself to grow through the blocks and barriers of imposter syndrome and the associated internalised societal odds... Has had me in stillness, sitting with abstract lessons and my imagination in motion at the same time. I want to take a moment to thank my daughter, my first born. For she is so much of a part of The Immortal Sisterhood and by the time the book is published on August 13th 2026, she will be two and we would have welcomed her sibling earthside. If you were to tell me, aged 23 when I somehow landed my first job on radio, having never been to university, growing up in a era of toxicity and a childhood that I would end up learning could have rendered me a wreckage... That I would be here, doing this, loving this.. life in such a way... I would never have believed you. The expanse of healing that The Immortal Sisterhood has offered me cannot be simply articulated... as an understanding of how to sense the complexity of beauty in this life of ours feels too evolving for me to encapsulate in one post. Get the book. So greatful for it all. You can pre-order your copy @foylesforbooks @waterstones @portybooks so far, (link in my bio) I would be overjoyed if you could ask your local bookshop to stock it. Oh! & we'll see you on book tour! Dates coming soon. #theimmortalsisterhood #theimmortalsisterhoodlive #writing

Yesterday I took my family to say goodbye to the massive hulk of mettle I spent my entire first book advance on ten years ago... Dandelion the bus, was an investment in world building and unity for what was my forthcoming debut as a published author - Open, A Toolkit For How Magic & Messed Up Life Can Be... A Young Adult guide and colourful love letter to living. Inspired by the Spice World that had exploded in my own formative adolescense in the 90s, it made sense to me, to turn up to Secondary Schools for book events on this customised bright yellow Double Decker Leyland. It was originally a travelling Sex Ed Bus in Belfast from 1991. I worked with a specialist team to make it half open-top and loved this vehicle with all my heart. It's travelled the country. From Margate to the Highlands of Scotland... She morphed into being a secret stage at Glastonbury, a spooky spot for a Halloween party in Inverness @gibson.emma , a temporary office for the production company I founded with @bethanyrobinclayton , been in carnival parades... Even some angry pyromaniacs attempted to destroy her once, but she survived! Dandelion gave me so much happiness and I held onto her with a dedicated hippy dream that I could maybe even one day live on it. If you know anything about me, going on to fall in love with an eco-lodge running man in Sub Saharan mountains, who lived in a tree house for seven years, you'll get how @cameronmac815 was also up for it! But ALAS. Our fam is growing by the day and new life, new projects are blossomin. So on this day of a full flower moon in 2026, with a tear... Dandelion is off to a wonderous place called @thebusstop.scot in East Lothian, Scotland where she'll be amongst larmas, other buses and we'll be able to go visit her and stay onsite in one of their many gorgeous bus-conversions ! I can't wait to tell my children that I once owned a bright yellow bus 💛. I love all my people that came along for the riiiiiiiiiiide. #DandelionTheBus

Anyone else see fractals in family lines & land cartography? This is my paternal great grandfather Alphonso who was part of a mountain community in the St Catherine Parish of Jamaica once known as Xmaycah (Taino for Land of Wood & Water). The highlands there are called Juan de Bolas after Juan Lubolo an original Maroon Chieftan alive in the 1600's many years before Alphonso lived there. Maroon's spent lifetimes fighting for the freedom of their people and the land in which they had been displaced to from Africa. This meant years in battle with firstly Spanish then the English troops hellbent on claiming the island their own to create plantations...Notably the Maroon's living as a free community outside of enslavement and forced labour that would only benefit the top tiers of a society living in Europe. Maroons often outsmarting opposition with knowledge of survival in mountainous terrain including herbology. To this day, the place and people's names bounce from connection to British, Spanish, West African and an Indigenous history of the island abundant in some of earth's most astonishing nature. I have been working with @alchemistjones to make ingredients of this research to infuse our creative practice. This has resulted in A (A Jones) creating sigils for each chapter of The Immortal Sisterhood. The last picture here, is the unique symbol in ode of the chapter about Nanny Of The Maroons, one of the 12 women in the Sisterhood and the remarkable woman behind some of the power of Xmaycah's Maroon legacy. #TheImmortalSisterhood. Sign up to www.theimmortalsisterhood.live to know more about the unfolding project and how you can pre-order the book...

SUCH A GORGEOUS CHAT with @novareidofficial talking about creativity, bounds, identity, funding, ancestors, the sea and her one woman show WORTHY, which we should all get a ticket for! 💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜🩵🩵💙💙💚

MY GOODNESS. My heart. I recorded an episode of @scroobiuspipyo 's Distraction Pieces Podcast years ago in my lounge in Margate &... Today he dropped a new episode of us reunited, only 520 episodes later. So MUCH HAS HAPPENED and I'm so different now, even if the love for living continues, the ground is far from the same, old. Link to the latest in both mine & Scroob's Stories. I hope you like it? Feel free to join in the conversation and comment below. 💛💛💛💛💛💛💛💛💛💛💛💛💛💛💛💛💛💛💛💛💛

Just in my garden, hanging with the hedge that plays sax.