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.
Commissioned Work
Garden of the Senses
New on this site, information about one of Jenny Lewis's earlier projects: in 2005 she was commissioned to write a poetry cycle, to be performed with music and dance at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival. Read about her work, Garden of the Senses, including an extract.
Sing Brighton
More recently, Jenny was commissioned by Brighton Early Music Festival to write a special poem to celebrate the joys and benefits of singing. The poem is sung to a 13th century melody from the Spanish Cantigas de Santa Maria. It received its first performance on Saturday, 25th October when it was sung by four choirs coming together to launch the Festival's 3 year project to get the city singing: Sing Brighton!
The performance formed part of a special procession which started at 6.30pm near the Theatre Royal on New Road and went on to St Bartholomew's Church on Ann Street. The choirs then took part in a concert at St Bartholomew's Church of a cappella music from Scotland and England, including a performance of Thomas Tallis' Spem in Alium with forty individual vocal lines all happening at once.
Jenny, who has been working with Clare Norburn, Artistic Director of the Brighton Early Music Festival, for several years, was given an Arts Council grant to study troubadour lyrics in the Languedoc. These were developed into a concert of troubadour songs and poems with the early music group, Third Voice and performed at festivals round the country and at the Royal Festival Hall.
There are more details about Sing Brighton!, including the text of the poem, on the Brighton Early Music Festival web site.
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: 15th November 2008