Jen Hadfield lives in Shetland, whose landscape and language persistently influence her poetry and visual art. Her work often pivots on the idea of the secular-sacred, relating to landscape – "It is in heaven as it is on earth" "it is on earth as it is in heaven." Liturgical rhythms underpin many of her poems about place, home, ecology, space – an idiomatic mythology of the here-and-now. 

Of her two books published by Bloodaxe, Almanacs was written in Shetland and the Western Isles in 2002 thanks to a bursary from the Scottish Arts Council, and it won an Eric Gregory Award in 2003. Nigh-No-Place, written in Canada and Shetland, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 2007 and won the T.S.Eliot Prize for poetry in 2008. 

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Related links

› Jen Hadfield's blog
› Jen was chosen for our Best Scottish Poems series in 2004 and 2008.
› Interview with Jen on our blog, Our Sweet Old Etcetera
› Jen on the Poetry Archive

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Featured poem

Hedgehog, Hamnavoe

Flinching in my hands
this soiled and studded but good heart,
which stippling my cupped palms, breathes –

a kidney flinching on a hot griddle,
or very small Hell's Angel, peeled from the verge
of a sweet, slurred morning.

Drunk, I coddle it like a crystal ball,
hellbent the realistic mysteries
should amount to more than guesswork

                        and fleas.

Jen Hadfield © 2005
from Nigh-No-Place (Bloodaxe, 2007)