Jane Feaver

Jane Feaver is a novelist and short-story write. Her first novel According to Ruth (Harvill Secker, 2007) was shortlisted for the Authors’ Club best first novel award and the Dimplex prize. This was followed by a cycle of linked short stories Love Me Tender (Harvill Secker, 2009), which was shortlisted for the Edge Hill short-story prize. An Inventory of Heaven (Corsair, 2012) is set, as her stories are, in a remote rural community, and, among other things, examines the relevance of the pastoral as location and fictional mode: the play between metaphoric and literal, nostalgia and documentary, fantasy and (often brutal) reality.

Jane came to writing relatively late. After reading English at university she worked for a couple of years at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, and then for a dozen years during the 1990s in the poetry department of Faber. It wasn’t until she left London for Devon, in 2001, where she took over the running of the charity, Farms for City Children, that she began to write with any serious intent.

In 2006 she gave up regular employment to become a freelance writer, editor and teacher. She has been a regular tutor for the Arvon Foundation, is a patron of the National Academy of Writing, and serves on the editorial board of the short-story journal, Riptide. In 2013 she was appointed as a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Exeter.