Jane Draycott FRSL is a British poet and poetic translator.[1]
Draycott was born in London in 1954 and studied at King's College London and the University of Bristol. Her debut pamphlet No Theatre (Smith/Doorstop, 1997) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and her first full collection Prince Rupert's Drop[2] (OUP and Carcanet Press, 1999), was shortlisted two years later for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. In 2002 she was the winner of the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry with the title poem of her second collection, The Night Tree and in 2004 was nominated as one of the Poetry Book Society's 'Next Generation' poets. In 2009 her collection ''Over'' was nominated for the T S Eliot Prize, and in 2016 her next collection The Occupant'' was selected as a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her fifth collection ''The Kingdom'' was published in 2023 by Carcanet Press.
Draycott's translation work includes a poetic translation of the 14th century elegy ''Pearl'' - a Stephen Spender Prize-winner - and a collection of new translations of the 20th century artist and poet Henri Michaux ''Storms Under the Skin'' (a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation) published in 2017 by Two Rivers Press.
She teaches as Senior Associate Tutor on Oxford University's MSt in Creative Writing, and until 2022 was Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University as well as a mentor on the Crossing Borders[3] creative writing initiative, set up by the British Council and Lancaster University. In addition to her work at Oxford and Lancaster, she was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University 2004-06, as well as at Aston University in 2010-12 and Royal Holloway University of London 2021-22.
She was previously poet in residence at Henley's River and Rowing Museum, creating a millennium archive of audio interviews with the men and women working on the London Thames, and in 2013 was Writer-in-Residence hosted by the Dutch Foundation for Literature in Amsterdam, researching poet Martinus Nijhoff's modernist Dutch narrative Awater. In 2014-16 she was a Royal Literary Fund [RLF] Lector, becoming an Advisory Fellow in 2018 and appointed as an RLF Associate Fellow in 2022.
Draycott has recorded a number of her poems for The Poetry Archive[4] and is one of the poets featured in the national Poetry By Heart anthology.[5] Her collaborative work includes two collections from Two Rivers Press - Christina the Astonishing (1992) co-written with poet Lesley Saunders and illustrated by artist Peter Hay, and Tideway (2002), a sequence of poems written as part of a project with photographer Jaap Oepkes documenting the lives of London's Company of Thames Watermen and women, with artworks by artist Peter Hay (both collections republished in 2022 in the Two Rivers Classics series). Her poem from this collection, 'No 3 from Uses for the Thames', was shortlisted for the 2002 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem and features in the Poems on the Underground 2016 series 'London is Open'. Other collaborative work includes several award-winning sound-compositions with poet Elizabeth James (Sea Green I and II - winner of BBC R3 Poem for Radio 1998; A Glass Case for BBC R3 Between the Ears (1999), produced by Susan Roberts; and Rock Music for LBC radio, winner of a London Sound Art Award 2000, produced by Richard Shannon).
In 2010 she was part of Simon Barraclough's Psycho Poetica, a collaborative multi-media event launched at the British Film Institute for the 50th anniversary of Hitchcock's seminal thriller, and in 2013 was one of ten poets commissioned by Barraclough for his BFI collaborative project Poets on Pasolini: A New Decameron. Her poem 'Who keeps observance in the fever room?' from Julia Bird's 2015Beginning to See the Light event at London's South Bank has been made into a film by filmmaker Corinne Silva. Settings to music of Draycott's poems have included a setting for the award-winning choir Tenebrae by composer Joanna Marsh of 'In Winter's House' (originally commissioned as part of laureate Carol Ann Duffy's 'Carols for Christmas' for The Guardian December 2010), premiered at the Wigmore Hall in December 2019.
Draycott has served on the judging panels for a number of literary prizes, including the T S Eliot Prize, the Society of Authors' Vondel Prize for translation, the Edward Thomas Prize, The Troubadour International Poetry Prize, the Tower Poetry Competition (Christ Church Oxford) and the UK Poetry Society's National Poetry Competition, Foyles Young Poets Awards and Geoffrey Dearmer Prize.
In 2020 Draycott was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2023 was awarded a Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award.