Jessica Traynor is a poet, essayist, librettist, and poetry editor at Banshee. Her debut collection, Liffey Swim (Dedalus Press, 2014), was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award. The Quick (Dedalus Press, 2018) was an Irish Times book of the year. Pit Lullabies (Bloodaxe, 2022) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was an Irish Times book of the year, and a Guardian Best Summer Read of 2022. It was shortlisted for the Yeats Society Sligo/ Irish Independent Poetry Prize.
She is 2023 recipient of the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry. Other awards include the Ireland Chair of Poetry Prize, the Listowel Poetry Prize, and Hennessy New Writer of the Year. She is 2023 Arts Council Writer in Residence in Galway University. She was a judge for the 2023 Forward Prizes and is a critic for The Irish Times.
“When I was a teenager, I was inspired by the poems of Derek Mahon, especially the poem A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford. What I loved about it was that while I didn’t feel I understood it the first time I read it – there were so many references to history and other texts – I felt there was something important being said about life and death and human nature, and my curiosity was sparked. I wanted to know what these mushrooms were all about! More than twenty years later, and parts of the poem are still opening up to me. This, for me, is the magic of poetry – we don’t need to understand everything in it, just to be guided by what makes us curious.”