JEAN SPRACKLAND

Jean Sprackland is a poet, writer of creative non-fiction, and one of the founding members of the Centre for Place Writing. The author of five volumes of poetry, her most recent collection, Green Noise, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2018. Her prose book, Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach (Jonathan Cape, 2012) was awarded the Portico Prize for Non-Fiction. A second prose book, These Silent Mansions: A Life in Graveyards, was published by Cape in 2020. Between 2006 and 2020, she was Chair of the Poetry Archive: the world’s premier online collection of recordings of poets reading their work. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University where she is also lead on the development of the new Manchester Poetry Library. She lives in London. For PLACE 2020 Jean explores a goyle (a steep ravine or gully) in the Blackdown Hills, ‘no one in their right mind goes down there.’