Iona Lee performs every night at Hidden Door: Wednesday 3rd – Sunday 7th June

Iona Lee is a poet, artist, and performer from Edinburgh. Iona started out in the world of spoken-word, cutting her teeth in the open-mics and grimy dive bars of Edinburgh’s Old Town.

In the decade since, she has become a stalwart figure on the Scottish literary scene, and have travelled all over the UK and Europe, sharing her work in venues and on festival stages, and appearing on radio and television. She has read her work everywhere from Shetland to Cornwall, and from dive bars to the Royal Albert Hall.

Iona’s work has been published widely, with poems appearing in the likes of Poetry London, The Scotsman, and Irish Pages, and in anthologies such as Watkins’ ‘The Modern Craft’, and Hatchett Publishing’s ‘Poems for a Green and
Blue Planet’. Her critically-acclaimed debut collection, ‘Anamnesis’, was published by Polygon in 2023. It was long-listed for a Saltire Award, shortlisted for the Edwin Morgan Award, won the Somerset Maugham Award, and was included in SNACK Magazine’s list of the top ten books published in Scotland in that year.

In 2024, Iona was the poet-in-residence at StAnza Festival, in partnership with the Edwin Morgan Trust. Influenced by Morgan’s work in sound, concrete, and visual poetry, she developed new process-led writing techniques, creating ‘What I Love About A Cloud Is Its Unpredictability’ – a body of experimental eco-
poetics featuring visual poetry made through interactions with the geolocation software what3words. It was published by Trickhouse Press in late 2024, and was recommended by The Poetry Society. In 2025, she created ‘Production Line of Dreams’, a spoken-word and music show with her band Acolyte for Hidden
Door Festival.

Among Iona’s recent commissions are collaborations with Hot Poets – a collective dedicated to translating climate science into poetry, with her poem about environmental DNA being selected by Michael Rosen for their school resources – and ‘SIBYL’, a spoken-word theatre show written for Push The Boat Out Festival and the National Theatre of Scotland.

For Hidden Door, Iona will read work from her previous two collections, as well as new work from her next book, due to be released next year. Her current writing is inspired by suspensions of disbelief and acts of imagination – influenced in part by her upbringing as the child of actors.

Iona spent much of her childhood backstage in theatres, witnessing exactly what goes into constructing a fantasy. Another major influence for the book is her part-time work as a history tour guide in Edinburgh’s Old Town. Iona has spent the past few years immersed in Scotland’s history and mythology, and she has become particularly interested in John Damian – private alchemist to James IV. He was given the sole task of finding the secret that would turn base metals into gold, and famously constructed himself a pair of wings and leapt from the battlements of Stirling Castle in the hope that he might fly. He was not successful.

But it’s more the leap than the landing that she is interested in. That is the central motif of this book: the hinge between illusion and reality. Iona is interested in this moment of creative alchemy – how our minds transform the mundane into the magical, and how that spell might be broken.