Jane Weir

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Jane Weir is Anglo-Italian. She was the overall winner of the Wigtown Poetry Competition in 2008, joint winner of the first Jackson Dawson Award for Poetry (2003) and her first collection, The Way I Dressed During the Revolution, was shortlisted in 2006 for the Glen Dimplex New Writers Award. Before Playing Romeo, her second collection, was launched at the Wordsworth Trust Summer Readings in October 2007. Jane Weir has also published a pamphlet, Alice, based partially on the life of the early twentieth century Derby political activist, Alice Wheeldon and has just completed a pamphlet, Signs of Early Man, to be published at the Derwent Poetry Festival in autumn 2009.

Her third collection on lives of women in the Italian Renaissance Gazehound will be published in 2010. Jane is also the Fiction Editor of the literary magazine Iota.

Her latest book, Walking the Block, is a poetic biography based on the lives of the Modernist handblock printers and textile artists, Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher, who created a unique range of hand block printed naturally dyed textiles between the two World wars. Their work was widely commissioned by a range of clients including Coco Chanel, the Duke of Westminster, Winchester Cathedral and Girton College, Cambridge. Jane Weir was also responsible for designing the book with a view to emulating the creative approaches of Phyllis and Dorothy and it is printed from paper manufactured from sustainable forest sources and printed with vegetable based inks. Jane has also recently completed an adaptation of Walking the Block, as a radio play.

Jane Weir’s poetry has been widely published in anthologies and magazines including Out of Fashion (Faber: 2005), Answering Back (Picador: 2007), PN Review, Ulster Tatler (2008), The Forward Book of Poetry (2007, 2008) and the International Sonnet Competition Prize Anthology (2008). Her winning poem from the 2008 Wigtown Poetry Competition, ‘On the Recommendation of Ovid We Tried a Weasel’, is one of two published in the 2009 Forward Book of Poetry. Jane was mentioned by Carol Ann Duffy in the Guardian interview following her appointment as Poet Laureate as one of the best new voices in contemporary poetry. Her poem ‘Poppies’, which appeared in a Guardian Review feature on contemporary war poetry, commissioned by the Poet Laureate, generated a widespread response. The link to the full Guardian piece is:

www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/25/war-poetry-carol-ann-duffy

Website: www.janeweir.co.uk