Emilie Jelinek won the 2024 Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Competition judged by Imtiaz Dharker with her second pamphlet, The Sky Around My Father (Bloodaxe Books/Mslexia, 2025), following her debut, Wing Formula (Against the Grain Press, 2023). Her poems have appeared in Acumen, Ambit, Finished Creatures, 14 magazine, Mslexia, Poetry Ireland Review, Resurgence, Under the Radar and Ireland’s Munster Literary Review, Southword: New International Writing. She won second prize in both the Winchester Poetry Prize in 2023 and the Wells Open Poetry Prize in 2024, where she also received the Hilly Cansdale Award. She was a finalist in Mslexia’s Poetry Competition in 2023 and was highly commended in the Belfast Book Festival’s Mairtín Crawford Award for Poetry and the McLellan Poetry Competition in 2022. She was awarded a distinction for her MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University in 2023. She grew up in Belgium and France and has spent her career working for international organisations in Russia, Afghanistan, Haiti, Myanmar and West Africa, returning to the UK in 2014. She lives in Bath with her husband and two children.
