Summary

Who would be in your immortal sisterhood?

In this episode of How You Find Your Voice, Jessie Huth speaks to award-winning broadcaster, writer, DJ and cultural producer Gemma Cairney.

Gemma’s new book, The Immortal Sisterhood, brings together twelve extraordinary women who have guided her through life. Artists, writers, activists, musicians, mystics and visionaries, including Audre Lorde, Grace Jones, Mary Wollstonecraft, Marsha P. Johnson, Una Marson, Betty Davis and Pharaoh Hatshepsut.

Part memoir, part biography, part love letter, The Immortal Sisterhood is an invitation to create our own constellation of guiding stars. But it is also a deeply personal book, shaped by six years of grief, solitude, healing, joy and profound change.

Gemma reflects on the period of exhaustion and isolation that led her to reassess her life after years in a busy public-facing career. She talks about losing her friend Caroline Flack, spending lockdown alone by the sea and the ancestral work that helped her find her way back to herself.

Together, Gemma and Jessie explore what Gemma calls “deep erasure”: the women, Black, queer, trans and marginalised voices that have been ignored, distorted or written out of history.

Gemma shares the challenges of bringing The Immortal Sisterhood into the world, from creative self-doubt to repeated funding rejections, and the bravery it takes to keep making, experimenting and pushing against closed doors. She also explains how the book expanded into an interdisciplinary live performance combining poetry, music, opera, movement and strings.

They talk about burnout, motherhood, gatekeeping, ADHD, the value of solitude and the importance of putting down our phones and looking up and Gemma offers her own joyful prescription for a fuller life.

This is a conversation about the voices that guide us, the forces that erase us and the courage to keep creating. It is also an invitation to go deeper, get weirder and stop apologising for who we are becoming.

Topics covered

The twelve women of The Immortal Sisterhood
Creating a personal constellation of guiding stars
Grief, solitude and healing
Losing Caroline Flack and processing public grief
Burnout after a long public-facing career
Ancestral work and reconnecting with the past
The deep erasure of women’s stories
Black, queer, trans and marginalised histories
Marsha P. Johnson, Una Marson, Audre Lorde and Betty Davis
Imagination as a tool for survival
Art, creativity and meaning in a profit-driven world
Gatekeeping and the struggle to secure arts funding
Continuing to create in the face of rejection
Turning a book into an interdisciplinary live performance
Digital dependency and the loss of human connection
ADHD and the frustrations of an increasingly automated world
Motherhood, creativity and creating sanctuary
Finding your voice through change
Poetry, dancing and the everyday practices that bring us back to life

About Gemma Cairney

Gemma Cairney is a multi-award-winning broadcaster, writer, documentary-maker, DJ and cultural producer. A former Brit School pupil and fashion stylist, she has presented across the BBC, including shows for Radio 1, 1Xtra, Radio 4, 6 Music and the BBC World Service. She has won Sony Awards for documentaries exploring subjects including domestic abuse, and has written for publications including The Guardian, Glamour, Red and Cosmopolitan.

Gemma is Chair of Edinburgh Art Festival and hosts Dream Space, a podcast for Factory International in which she guides artists through their creative dreams. Her first book, Open: A Toolkit for How Magic and Messed-Up Life Can Be, was published in 2017.

Her new book, The Immortal Sisterhood, is published by Canongate on 13 August 2026. Gemma also made her directorial debut with The Immortal Sisterhood LIVE, an ensemble-led adaptation blending poetry, music, opera and movement, which premiered at New York’s Lincoln Center in January 2025.

You can find out more about Gemma and The Immortal Sisterhood through her website You can follow Gemma on Instagram at @gemagain

About the podcast

How You Find Your Voice is the podcast that asks brilliant guests, mostly women, how they found or reclaimed their voices, on and off the page.
Through conversations with writers, artists, thinkers and campaigners, we explore the work they have made, the lives they have lived and the inner transformations that made it possible.

We talk about turning points and resistance, silence and expression, creativity and courage, and the often messy journey of becoming.

Listen and follow

If you enjoyed this conversation, please follow the podcast and leave a review. It really helps more people discover the show and supports independent podcasts like this one.

👉 Click here to follow the podcast on your favourite app

If you'd like to stay connected to these conversations and hear about upcoming podcasts, live salons and literary events, you can join the How You Find Your Voice mailing list.

You can also find us on Substack for essays, behind-the-scenes reflections and further explorations of voice, identity and transformation.