Poet - Singer-songwriter - Teacher
Jenny Lewis trained as a painter before reading English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford and gaining an M.Phil in Poetry from the University of Glamorgan. She has been a singer-songwriter, an advertising copywriter, a children's author, playwright and screenwriter, a teacher and a civil servant. Lewis currently lives in Oxford, where she teaches poetry at Oxford University.
She has recently retired from the Equality and Human Rights Commission and has now moved on to set up a new venture, Oxford Writing and Training, which aims to provide a range of courses for everyone interested in extending their creative writing and written communication skills.
Jenny has just completed a four week residency at the Sanskriti Centre in New Delhi, where she and artist Frances Kiernan are working with the distinguished poet, and organiser of the Delhi International Literary Festival, Sudeep Sen. Their intention was to explore, through poetry, imagery and visual art, the power of plants and nature to restore balance and heal the body and mind; and while Jenny was away, she sent home the following pictures from India:
Read more about this residency, including Jenny's explanations of the pictures.
About Gilgamesh
Jenny Lewis has been commissioned to write a verse play, About Gilgamesh, for the inaugural programme of Pegasus Theatre's new, £7 million Heritage Lottery funded theatre, opening in autumn 2010.
The photographs above show the Afropean Choir (and their leader, Anita Daulne), with whom Jenny will be working on About Gilgamesh. The pictures were taken on 14th December at a presentation by the Choir of African-based polyphonic music. Jenny says "By the end they had the whole audience singing parts in harmony - a wonderfully uplifting experience!"
Read more about Gilgamesh, and how this fits in with Jenny's current poetry.
Molossus
Jenny Lewis is the UK contributor for a new online magazine. She explauns: "One of my gifted students on the Oxford University Creative Writing Master of Studies, David Shook, has created an 'online broadside of intelligent world conversation' called Molossus. David invited me to be the UK contributor and I have so far submitted two articles - one a review of Sudeep Sen's book of poetry translations, Aria, and one, an interview with the distinguished poet K. Satchidanandan."
Read more about Molossus and Jenny's contributions here
Fathom
Jenny's latest poetry collection, Fathom, was published by Carcanet Press in May 2007, and is available from the publisher.
Her poems, in fact, employ many of the techniques of painting, drawing readers in through the gleam of colours so intense and appealing as to be almost edible: "dark plum and liquorice", "rose and burnt caramel", "sunlight in squares as shiny as toffee".
Sarah Crown, The Guardian
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Last update: 26th January 2010