Jane Draycott was born in 1954 and studied at King’s College London and Bristol University. Her collections include Prince Rupert’s Drop (1999, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection) and The Night Tree (2004), both Poetry Book Society Recommendations. In 2002 she won the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize. She was chosen as one of the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation Poets in 2004. Draycott has worked as a teacher in London, Tanzania and Strasbourg, and as resident writer at Henley’s River and Rowing Museum. She currently teaches on postgraduate writing programmes at Oxford University and the University of Lancaster. Over (Carcanet Press, 2005) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Since then, she has published further collections with Carcanet, including The Kingdom (2022) and The Occupant (2016), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She won a Cholmondeley Award in 2023 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.