Jen Hadfield lives in Shetland where she works as a poet, writing tutor, artist and sometimes shop assistant. Her first collection Almanacs (Bloodaxe Books, 2005) won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, which enabled her to begin writing Nigh-No-Place in Canada. She recently received a Dewar Award to produce a solo exhibition of Shetland ex-votos in the style of sacred Mexican folk art, incorporating rubrics of very short fiction. She plays the mandolin and banjo-mandolin badly. Jen Hadfield won the T.S. Eliot Prize for her second collection, Nigh-No-Place (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), which was also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection.