Wain

Rachel Plummer is a poet living in Edinburgh. She is a Scottish Book Trust New Writer’s Award winner (2016) and has won or placed in numerous other awards and competitions, including the Troubadour Prize, the Flambard Prize, the Penfro, and Canterbury Festival’s Poet of the Year Award. Helene Boppert was born in 1992 right in the middle of Germany in a small, sweet village full of ancient trees, old houses and wild animals. With a heavy heart she left her cats with her parents after she graduated school, and moved to the vibrant city of Hamburg to pursue her dream to study Fine Art and Illustration. For four years she took every opportunity to learn her craft, travel and make friends all over the world. She hasn’t stopped traveling since.She started working as an illustrator in editorial and book publishing in 2015, and self-published an illustrated book about the lives of codebreakers at Bletchley Park three years later. She has recently taken up university studies in her spare time to further her understanding of human connection and education.Enriched by her childhood’s fantasy world and shaped by her experiences in discovering herself, she uses her watercolours to illustrate soft, vivid, imaginative slices of life.

Plummer’s message of supportive positivity and self-affirmation through legend and myth reassures any young reader that there are so many shades of being — that it is important, though often hard, to be who you are or want to be, not what others demand or expect to you be. [...] These poems are a deeply humane and necessary way of rehabilitating the old with the new and I wish as a child I’d had access to such resources as the poems and paintings in Wain.