About

Mary Jean Chan is the author of the debut poetry collection Flèche, published by Faber & Faber (2019). Flèche won the Costa Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award. Poems from the book were twice shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, came second in the National Poetry Competition and won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize.

Chan's second book, Bright Fear (Faber, 2023), was chosen as a 2023 Guardian Best Poetry Book and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Writers' Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. 100 Queer Poems (Vintage, 2022), co-edited with Andrew McMillan, was a Guardian most notable anthology of 2022. Siblings, a collaborative pamphlet co-written with Jay Bernard, Will Harris and Nisha Ramayya, was published by Monitor Books in 2024.

Chan has served as a judge for the 2023 Booker Prize, the 2024 Singapore Literature Prize and the 2025 Dylan Thomas Prize. A former Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at the University of Cambridge, Chan is currently Departmental Lecturer in Poetry on the MSt in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford and a Senior Research Fellow at Harris Manchester College, Oxford.