Poet and translator Jane Draycott will read from her work at the Albion Beatnik Bookstore in Oxford on Sunday 11 March, at 6pm. The event, in association with Ambit, will also feature Clare Morgan, Donald Gardner, and others, to be confirmed. There will be a small cover charge, and wine will be on sale during the event. For more information, please click here.


Pearl (Carcanet, 2010)
In a dream landscape radiant with jewels, a father sees his lost daughter on the far bank of a river: ‘my pearl, my girl’. One of the great treasures of the British Library, the fourteenth-century poem Pearl is a work of poetic brilliance. Its account of loss and consolation retains its force across six centuries. Jane Draycott in her new translation remakes the imaginative intensity of the original. This is, Bernard O’Donoghue says in his introduction, ‘an event of great significance and excitement’, an encounter between medieval tradition and an acclaimed modern poet.

Jane Draycott
Jane Draycott was born in London and studied at King’s College London and Bristol University. Her first full collection, Prince Rupert’s Drop, 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 was shortlisted for the 2009 T.S. Eliot Prize, and her translation of the 14th-century Pearl is a PBS Recommendation and winner of a Stephen Spender Prize for Translation. She lives in Oxfordshire and is a tutor on postgraduate writing programmes at Oxford University and the University of Lancaster.