Jane Draycott

Jane Draycott is a poet whose collections from Carcanet Press include The Occupant, Over (nominated for the 2009 T.S. Eliot Prize), The Night Tree, and Prince Rupert’s Drop, (shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection). A Next Generation 2004 poet and previous winner of the Keats-Shelley Prize, her poetry has been shortlisted three times for the Forward Prizes for Poetry, including work from her collaboration with artist Peter Hay, Tideway (Two Rivers Press), about the working lives of the London watermen. Her 2011 translation of the medieval elegy Pearl was a Times Stephen Spender prize-winner, and her latest collection of translations Storms Under the Skin: Henri Michaux Selected Poems 1927-1954 (Two Rivers Press) is a PBS Recommendation.

Jane Draycott’s interest in dream narrative and elegy has led to developing associations with mental health-care professionals, including writer-psychoanalysts Adam Phillips and Caroline Garland, via the British Psychoanalytical Society, the NHS Tavistock Centre and the Freud Museum, London. Other collaborations have included Christina the Astonishing, a meditation with Lesley Saunders on the life of the medieval saint reputed to have flown like a bird from her own coffin, and three projects with the British Film Institute: Essentially British (2008), Psychopoetica (2011) and Poets for Pasolini (2013). Her sound-montages with poet Elizabeth James for BBC Radio 3 (Sea Green I) and LBC (Rock Music, recorded at the Wallace Collection and on a rock face in the Wye valley) have won BBC Radio 3 and London Sound-Art awards.

A trained teacher with many years’ experience working with international students, Jane developed the trAce /British Council Transcripts project (S. Asia) and was a mentor on the Crossing Borders project (Africa) with the British Council/Lancaster University. She currently teaches on postgraduate writing programmes at Oxford University and the University of Lancaster.

Jane Draycott’s work includes seven collections of poetry and poetic translation,including a contemporary verse translation of the medieval elegy Pearl. Her work has been awarded the Keats Shelley Prize, The Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, and nominations for the Forward and T S Eliot prizes. A trained teacher who finds working as part of the Bridge team highly rewarding, she has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Brookes, Aston and Royal Holloway universities, supporting students from a wide range of backgrounds across a broad variety of subjects and individual interests.