Jane Draycott

Jane Draycott is a British poet. She is Senior Course Tutor on Oxford University's MSt in Creative Writing and teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Lancaster.
Life and career.
Draycott was born in London in 1954. She studied at King's College London and the University of Bristol. Her pamphlet "No Theatre" (Smith/Doorstop) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 1997, and her first full collection "Prince Rupert's Drop" (1999), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. In 2002, she was the winner of the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry and in 2004, she was nominated as one of the Poetry Book Society's 'Next Generation' poets. Her 2009 collection "Over" (Carcanet Press) was nominated for the T S Eliot Prize. Her other books include "Christina the Astonishing" (with Lesley Saunders and Peter Hay, 1998) and "Tideway" (illustrated by Peter Hay, 2002), both from Two Rivers Press. She was previously poet in residence at Henley's River and Rowing museum. She lectures in creative writing at Oxford University and the University of Lancaster, and has been a mentor on the Crossing Borders creative writing initiative, which was set up by the British Council and Lancaster University. Her 2011 translation of the 14th century elegy "Pearl" - in which she aims at a fluid and echoing character which loosens some of the original end-stopped pulse - was a winner in the Stephen Spender Prize for translation. In 2013 she was Writer-in-Residence hosted by the Dutch Foundation for Literature in Amsterdam, researching Martinus Nijhoff's modernist narrative "Awater". She was a Royal Literary Fund Lector 2014-16 and is an RLF Advisory Fellow 2018-21. Draycott has recorded a number of her poems for The Poetry Archive and is one of the poets featured in the national "Poetry By Heart" anthology. Her 2016 collection "The Occupant" (Carcanet Press) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. An anthology of new translations of the 20th century artist and poet Henri Michaux "Storms Under the Skin" (a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation) was published in 2017 by Two Rivers Press.