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Jane Clarke was born in 1961 and grew up on a farm in Co. Roscommon. She lives with her partner in Glenmalure, Co. Wicklow, where she combines writing with her work as a creative writing tutor and group facilitator. 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. She was awarded an Arts Council of Ireland Literary Bursary in 2017. 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 Caf National Poetry Award 2020, as well as being longlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize 2020. Jane also edited Origami Doll, New and Collected Shirley McClure (Arlen House, 2019) and guest-edited The North 61: Irish Issue (The Poetry Business, 2019) with Nessa O'Mahony. In May 2020 Jane Clarke presented The Miners' Way, a half-hour feature for Radio 4 that was chosen for Radio 4's Pick of the Week. This included a new sequence of poems as well as one from When the Tree Falls.
The virtues of Jane Clarke's writing include a broad sympathy that never usurps the voice of the other, that guides the reader to understanding and respect; a pleasure in ingenious objects and crafts that is deftly transmitted; and a clarity which does not deny mystery but makes room for it. -- Eilean Ni Chuilleanain * Dublin Review of Books * Clarke registers with memorable cadence and verbal simplicity the changing pattern of the seasons as it shapes the daily life of a farm and, at the same time, the very human experience of loss, ambivalence and eternal impermanence. -- Peter Abbs * Resurgence & Ecologist * Clear, direct, lovely: Jane Clarke's voice slips into the Irish tradition with such ease, it is as though she had always been at the heart of it. -- Anne Enright
