Jenna Clake was born in Staffordshire in 1992. Her debut collection of poetry, Fortune Cookie, won the Melita Hume prize in 2016, and was published in 2017 by Eyewear. It received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2018, and was shortlisted for a Somerset Maugham Award in the same year. Her pamphlet of prose poems, CLAKE/ Interview for, was published by Verve Poetry Press in 2018, and was featured as a spring pamphlet in the Poetry Book Society Bulletin in 2019. She was shortlisted for the inaugural Rebecca Swift Women Poets’ Prize, commended in the University of Hertfordshire Single Poem Prize, and placed second in the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2018. Her second full collection, Museum of Ice Cream, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2021. Her debut novel, Disturbance, was published by Trapeze in the UK and W.W. Norton in the US in 2023, and is shortlisted for the 2024 Nota Bene Prize. Jenna is writer in residence for ORCA, writing on cetacean conservation, marine mammals, and whale watching. Her poetry criticism has appeared in Poetry London, The Poetry School, The Compass and The Poetry Review. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Birmingham and lectures at Teesside University.
Author photo: Jamie Logue
