Jean Sprackland is Professor of Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, and Chair of the Poetry Archive. Her debut collection, Tattoos for Mother’s Day (Spike, 1997), was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. Her second collection, Hard Water (Jonathan Cape, 2003), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was shortlisted for the 2003 T.S. Eliot Prize and for the Whitbread Poetry Award. Her third collection, Tilt (Jonathan Cape, 2007), won the Costa Poetry Award. Cape also published Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach, a series of meditations on walking the beaches between Blackpool and Liverpool, which won the Portico Prize. Her most recent collections from Cape are Sleeping Keys (2013) and Green Noise (2018), while her latest prose book is These Silent Mansions: A life in graveyards (Jonathan Cape, 2020). Her co-translation with Natalia Bukia-Peters of Diana Anphimiadi’s Why I No Longer Write Poems is published by Bloodaxe Books with the Poetry Translation Centre in 2022.
