John Penrose was born in West Cornwall and moved to the Isles of Scilly in 1963. Apart from a period working in technology and education on the Mainland, he has lived in Scilly ever since. His family roots lie entirely in West Penwith, reaching back through the centuries to the earliest written records of 1636. This deep ancestral anchorage—the granite, the winds, the ancient paths, and the quiet stories—threads through his art, his language work, his poetry, and his humour. John’s creative, linguistic, and technical pursuits have always run side by side. He studied at Shoreditch College, the University of London, and later at Nottingham, Loughborough and Exeter, earning a Master of Philosophy in Systems Electronics. In 2024 he was awarded an Honorary Degree by Brunel University. An enthusiastic Amateur Radio experimenter with published work on antenna design, he also studied British Prehistory Archaeology and trained in resistant materials. Deeply committed to Cornish culture, John has written two Cornish language databases, including a conjugated verb database. A talented landscape and portrait artist, he was awarded the Gorsedh Kernow Awen Medal for Creativity and was later Barded for his contribution to Cornish culture and the arts. With a sandy beach and the sea just outside his modest back gate, John writes with a strong sense of continuity and belonging. His creative work has appeared in local periodicals and is influenced by landscape, life, history and legend.