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. ^[1]

Life and career

Draycott was born in London in 1954 and 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 ^[2] (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 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. She is a mentor on the Crossing Borders ^[3] creative writing system, which was set up by the British Council and Lancaster University.^[4] Her latest work is her first translation - the 14th century Middle English poem Pearl - in which she aims at a fluid and echoing character which loosens some of the original end-stopped pulse.

Reviews

David Morley in The Guardian commented:

Poetry persuades by the precision of its language, and this necessary exactness is carefully and coldly won over years of drafting and redrafting. Jane Draycott's first collection, Prince Rupert's Drop, was well received and rightly so. Her work had a patient intelligence of practice, and concision of address, not only in every poem in that book but in the very philosophy of perception informing her poetics.^[5]

In the same newspaper, Sean O'Brien wrote:

Those who enjoyed Jane Draycott's "Tideway" poems, deriving from her work with the Thames watermen in her previous book, The Night Tree (2004), will know how well she evokes the otherness of the underwater river-world, its shifts, silences, doorways and vaulted depths, and it is in this sense that the word "quiet" should be applied to the chords and modulations of Draycott's eerie and beautiful poems. She listens, and therefore so do we.^[6]

Awards

• 2002 Keats Shelley Prize
• 2004 she was named as one of the Next Generation poets (Poetry Book Society)
• 2011 Stephen Spender Prize for Pearl

Works

• No Theatre. Smith/Doorstop Books. 1997. ISBN 978-1-869961-88-6. 
• Jane Draycott & Lesley Saunders (1998). Christina the Astonishing. Illustrator Peter Hay. Two Rivers Press. ISBN 978-1-901677-07-2. 
• Prince Rupert's Drop (Carcanet Press, 1999)
• Tideway. Illustrator Peter Hay. Two Rivers Press. 2002. ISBN 978-1-901677-33-1. 
• The Night Tree (Carcanet Press, 2004)
• Over (Carcanet Press, 2009)
• Pearl (Carcanet Press, 2011)

References

External links

• Author's Website
• Salt profile and poems
• "Precisely perfect". Review of The Night Tree in The Guardian Saturday 25 September 2004
• "Jane Draycott reviews How to Write a Poem by John Redmond". Tower Poetry.