About

Mary Jean Chan is the author of the debut poetry collection Flèche (Faber & Faber, 2019), which won the Costa Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize. Poems from the book also won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize and were twice shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.

Chan's second collection, Bright Fear (Faber, 2023), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Writers' Prize, and the Dylan Thomas Prize. A third collection, Movement's Measure, is forthcoming from Faber in June 2027. 100 Queer Poems (Vintage, 2022), co-edited with Andrew McMillan, was a Guardian best anthology of the year. Recent commissions include work for The British Museum, Somerset House, and the City of London Sinfonia.

As a critic, Chan served as a judge for the 2023 Booker Prize and the 2025 Dylan Thomas Prize. Formerly the 2023–24 Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge, Chan is Departmental Lecturer in Poetry on the MSt in Creative Writing at Oxford and a Senior Research Fellow at Harris Manchester College.