Pearl

JANE DRAYCOTT was born in London in 1954 and studied at King’s College London and Bristol University. Her first full collection, Prince Rupert’s Drop (Carcanet/OxfordPoets), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 1999. In 2002 she was the winner of the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry and in 2004, the year of her second collection, The Night Tree, she was nominated as one of the Poetry Book Society’s ‘Next Generation’ list of poets. Her third collection, Over (Carcanet/OxfordPoets), was shortlisted for the 2009 T.S. Eliot Prize. Jane Draycott’s 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 lives in Oxfordshire and is a tutor on postgraduate writing programmes at Oxford University and the University of Lancaster.

BERNARD O’DONOGHUE teaches Medieval English at Wadham College, Oxford, and has published seven books of poems, including Gunpowder, which won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry in 1995, and his Selected Poems (Faber, 2008). His verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was published by Penguin Classics in 2006.