Jane Draycott

Current Teaching

Distance Learning MA in Creative Writing; Distance Learning PhD in Creative Writing;

Profile

Jane Draycott was born in 1954 and studied at King's College London and Bristol, where she took a postgraduate degree in Medieval English Literature. Her most recent poetry collection Over (OxfordPoets 2009) was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize.

Listed as one of 20 'Next Generation' poets by the PBS/Arts Council (2004), her first two collections No Theatre (Smith/Doorstop 1996) and Prince Rupert's Drop (OUP 1999) were both nominated for the Forward Poetry Prize, and her 2004 collection The Night Tree (Oxford Poets) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. In 2002 she was winner of the Keats Shelley Prize for Poetry, and was nominated for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.  She was poet-in-residence at the River and Rowing Museum, Henley, creating sound montages and an audio archive with London's working watermen, as well as a short collection, Tideway, illustrated by Peter Hay (Two Rivers Press 2002).

Other collaborative work includes award-winning audio-montages with Elizabeth James for BBC Radio3, LBC and the web, and the Online/Offline Writing and Sound Project for trAce Online Writing Department at Nottingham Trent University. In addition to her teaching at Lancaster she is Senior Course Tutor on the MSt Creative Writing at the University of Oxford, and Tutor for the Arvon Foundation and the Poetry School, London. In 2004, she designed and delivered the British Council's Transcripts (South Asia) and Crossing Borders international writing projects. She was Royal Literary Fund Fellow 2004-06 at Oxford Brookes and 2010-12 at Aston University. In 2013 she wil complete a two-month residency in the Netherlands hosted by the Dutch Foundation for Literature.

She has been on the judging panels for the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry and the Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation.  Her most recent work, a translation of the 14th-century dream vision Pearl is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation 2011 and a Times Stephen Spender Prizewinner.