• Photo credit: Ray Burmiston

    About

    Mary Jean Chan is the author of the poetry collection Flèche, published by Faber & Faber (2019) and Faber USA (2020). Flèche won the 2019 Costa Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the International 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. An Italian translation of Flèche by Giorgia Sensi was published by Interno Poesia in 2023.

     

    Chan's second book, Bright Fear (Faber, 2023), is a Guardian Best Poetry Book of 2023 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Writers' Prize and the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Chan co-edited the anthology 100 Queer Poems (Vintage, 2022) with Andrew McMillan and co-wrote the pamphlet Siblings (Monitor Books, 2024). In 2023, Chan served as a judge for the Booker Prize. A recent Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at the University of Cambridge, Chan is a Departmental Lecturer in Poetry on the MSt in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford and a Research Fellow at Harris Manchester College, Oxford.

  • Poetry

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    Shortlisted for the 2023 Forward Prize

    for Best Collection, the 2024 Writers' Prize

    & the 2024 International Dylan Thomas Prize

     

    A Poetry Book Society Recommendation

     

    Reviews

     

    Thoughtful clear-sightedness abounds in Bright Fear...it is exhilarating to read a poet so sure of their intent. –​ The New Statesman

     

    Reading Bright Fear is like testing the blade of a knife and finding it exquisitely sharp. –​ The Guardian

     

    Written with a quiet intimacy, Mary Jean Chan's second collection hums by your ear with gentle, inviting and formally inventive poetry. – The Dylan Thomas Prize

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    Winner of the 2019 Costa Poetry Award

     

    A Poetry Book Society Recommendation

     

    Reviews

     

    One of those rare poets who leave you looking up with a sense that you can engage even the smallest part of the world around you with a much greater intensity. –​ PN Review

     

    Extraordinary, brilliant and...beautifully governed by formal rigour and literary excellence. –​ The Poetry Review

     

    As governing metaphor and organising principle...the sport [of fencing] provides enlivening strategies for the poetic realisation of loss and rebellion. –​ The Guardian

  • Events

    2024

     

    20 Jan: Reading with Victoria Adukwei Bulley & Momtaza Mehri, Blackwell's, Oxford

    31 Jan: Reading, Bright Fear by Mary Jean Chan, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge

    8 Feb: Reading with Isobel Dixon, Shehzar Doja & others, The Glasgow Network of Poets

    24 Feb: Reading, Bright Fear by Mary Jean Chan, Magdalene Poetry Society, Cambridge

    29 Feb: Reading, Bright Fear by Mary Jean Chan with Enora Lessinger, Daunt, Oxford