Jenny Lewis is a poet, playwright and translator who teaches poetry at Oxford University. She has had seven plays and poetry cycles performed at major UK theatres including the Leicester Haymarket, the Royal Festival Hall, the Polka Theatre, London (for children) and Pegasus Theatre, Oxford. Her first book of poetry, When I Became an Amazon (Iron Press, 1996/ Bilingua, Russia, 2002) was dramatized, broadcast on BBC Woman’s Hour, made into an opera (which won the Perm Laureate Prize, 2019) premiered by the Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Company (2017) and subsequently for International Women’s Day, 2023 by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Jenny has published four further collections Fathom (Oxford Poets/ Carcanet, 2007); Taking Mesopotamia (Oxford Poets/ Carcanet, 2014); Gilgamesh Retold (Carcanet Classics, 2018) – a New Statesman Book of the Year, an LRB Bookshop Book of the Week and Carcanet’s first audiobook – and From Base Materials (Carcanet, 2024). Jenny has also published three chapbooks from Mulfran Press in English and Arabic with the exiled Iraqi poet Adnan Al-Sayegh – Now as Then: Mesopotamia-Iraq (2013), Singing for Inanna (2014) and The Flood (2017); and a book, Let me tell you what I saw (Seren, 2020) which are part of the award-winning, Arts Council-funded ‘Writing Mesopotamia’ project aimed at fostering links between English and Arabic-speaking communities. Her recent work includes a sequence of ecopoems for Seed Guardians, written and directed by Yasmin Sidhwa, Mandala Theatre Company, 2024.