Jane Draycott FRSL is a British poet and translator. ^[1]

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^[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 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 and reissued in 2022. She was previously poet in residence at Henley's River and Rowing museum. 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, which was set up by the British Council and Lancaster University.^[4]

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, an RLF Advisory Fellow 2018-21 and was appointed an RLF Associate Fellow in 2022.

Draycott has recorded a number of her poems for The Poetry Archive^[5] and is one of the poets featured in the national Poetry By Heart anthology.^[6] 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. In 2023 her fifth collection The Kingdom was published by Carcanet Press.

• 1997 Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection - Shortlist (No Theatre)
• 1998 BBC Radio 3 Poem For Radio - with Elizabeth James (Winner)
• 1999 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection - Shortlist (Prince Rupert's Drop)
• 2002 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Single Poem - Shortlist (Uses for the Thames)
• 2002 Keats Shelley Prize (The Night Tree)
• 2004 Next Generation poet (Poetry Book Society)
• 2009 Hawthornden International Fellowship
• 2009 T S Eliot Prize - Shortlist (Over)
• 2011 Stephen Spender Prize for Pearl
• 2012 National Poetry Competition - Second Prizewinner (Italy to Lord)
• 2014 International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine (The Return)
• 2019 "TLS Mick Imlah Poetry Prize". - Second Prizewinner (In the bones of the disused gasometer)
• 2023 Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award

• 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.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
• The Night Tree (Carcanet Press, 2004)
• Over (Carcanet Press, 2009)
• Pearl (Carcanet Press, 2011)
• The Occupant (Carcanet Press, 2016)
• Storms Under the Skin (Two Rivers Press, 2017)
• The Kingdom (Carcanet Press, 2022)