Photo credit: Adrian Pope
Festival Poet
Mary Jean Chan is the author of Flèche, published by Faber & Faber (2019). Flèche won the 2019 Costa Book Award for Poetry and was listed as a Book of the Year in The Guardian, The Irish Times and The White Review. In 2020, Flèche was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, the Jhalak Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize.
Chan's poetry has featured in The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Telegraph, The White Review, and The Academy of American Poets. She came Second in the 2017 National Poetry Competition and won the 2018 Geoffrey Dearmer Prize. She was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2017 and 2019, and received an Eric Gregory Award in 2019. Her reviews have appeared in The Guardian, The Stinging Fly and Poetry London, with criticism published in The Journal of American Studies and The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. In Spring 2020, Chan served as guest co-editor with Will Harris at The Poetry Review.
Born and raised in Hong Kong, Chan lives in London and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oxford Brookes University.
Mary Jean will be appearing at: