Jane Clarke

Jane Clarke grew up on a farm in the west of Ireland and now lives with her wife in Glenmalure, Co. Wicklow. She holds a BA in English and Philosophy from Trinity College, Dublin, and an MPhil in Writing from the University of South Wales, and has a background in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Her first collection, The River, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2015. It was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, given for a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry evoking the spirit of a place. In 2016 she won the Hennessy Literary Award for Emerging Poetry and the inaugural Listowel Writers’ Week Poem of the Year Award. All the Way Home, Jane’s illustrated booklet of poems in response to a First World War family archive held in the Mary Evans Picture Library, London, was published by Smith|Doorstop in 2019. Her second book-length collection, When the Tree Falls (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), was shortlisted for the 2020 Pigott Poetry Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award 2020, as well as being longlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize 2020. Jane Clarke's third collection, A Change in the Air (Bloodaxe Books, 2023) was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Poetry Prize 2023, the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023, the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award 2024, as well as being longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2023. Coracle, Jane’s poetry pamphlet written in response to the biodiversity crisis, was commissioned and published in a limited edition by MoLI (The Museum of Literature Ireland), Dublin 2023. Jane edited the illustrated anthology, Windfall: Irish Nature Poems to Inspire and Connect (Hachette Books Ireland, 2023) as well as Origami Doll, New & Collected Shirley McClure (Arlen House 2019). 'The Irish poet Jane Clarke has followed a great debut collection with an even better second book. It delivers a clean, hard-earned simplicity and a lovely sense of line.' - Anne Enright, The Irish Times (Books of the Year 2019) A Change in the Air, Jane Clarke's third collection, is a quiet, stoical meditation on fragility and mortality. Humanity takes its place within the rhythms of a natural world built on acceptance, community and renewal. The title promises the best kind of revolution: freshness and wholesomeness - and the poems which follow deliver on this... In Jane Clarke's hands, clarity, purity and strength speak for themselves. Her words are weighed and used sparingly. They take your breath away.' - John Field, T S Eliot Prize 2024 Reviewer.