DURHAM LITERATURE FESTIVAL 2000

 

JO SHAPCOTT

Jo Shapcott was born in London and first came to prominence when she won first prize in the National Poetry Competition with The Surrealists Summer Convention Came to Our City. She is currently Northern Literary Fellow.

She spent most of her early childhood in Ireland and America and was educated at Trinity College Dublin where she gained a First Class Honours degree in English Language and Literature. She was a Foundation Scholar there from 1974-1979 and went on to study singing and music theory at the College of Music in Dublin. She then did postgraduate work in American Literature at St. Hilda’s College Oxford and was awarded a Harkness Fellowship from Harvard. She holds a Diploma in Adult and Community Education from Bristol University.

Jo has been employed as an Education Officer for the South Bank Centre and for the Arts Council of Great Britain. She regularly teaches creative writing for the Arvon Foundation, the Poetry Society and at Cambridge. She has travelled widely as a guest speaker and writer and has attended festivals and conferences such as the Harbourfront International Festival in Canada and the Rotterdam International Festival.

Jo Shapcott is the first person to have won the National Poetry Competition twice. The second time was in 1991 for the widely acclaimed poem Phrase Book. Her first collection, Electoplating the Baby (1Bloodaxe Books), was awarded a Commonwealth Prize.

Jo appears regularly on BBC Radio 3 and 4, Channel 4’s Rhyme and Reason and BBC 2’s Omnibus.

‘Shapcott is gifted and original, and it is in work such as hers that the future health of poetry needs to be sought.’

Sean O’Brien

‘Poems which have a way of turning physics into the physical, the sub-atomic field of matter into one vast erogenous zone.’

Independent On Sunday

‘There is about Shapcott’s poetry a passionate reticence. Once in disguise, though, pressed into each other skins and other perspectives, she howls and sings.’

The Times