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 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. Poems from the book were twice shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (2017 and 2019) and won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize. Flèche was translated into Italian by Giorgia Sensi and published by Interno Poesia in 2023.

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. In 2022, 100 Queer Poems, an anthology co-edited with Andrew McMillan, was published by Vintage. In 2023, Chan served as a judge for the Booker Prize, and more recently judged the 2025 Dylan Thomas Prize. A 2023-24 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.