Jacob Polley

Short Bio

Jacob Polley is the author of four acclaimed poetry collections, The Brink, Little Gods, The Havocs and Jackself, which won the 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize. His Somerset Maugham Award-winning novel, Talk of the Town, was published in 2009. Born in Cumbria, Jacob now lives and works in Newcastle.

Long Bio

Jacob Polley was born and grew up in Cumbria. His fourth book of poems, Jackself, won the 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry, the judges describing it as ‘a firework of a book; inventive, exciting and outstanding in its imaginative range and depth of feeling.’ His three previous books of poems, The Brink (2003), Little Gods (2006) and The Havocs (2012), are all published by Picador, UK. Both The Brink and The Havocs were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and The Havocs won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Jacob’s first novel, Talk of the Town, a fiercely demotic coming-of-age murder mystery, won the 2010 Somerset Maugham Award.

Jacob has held residencies in Queensland, at the Wordsworth Trust and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and he was Visiting Fellow Commoner in the Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, 2005-7. In 2004, he was named one of the ‘Next Generation’ of the twenty best new poets in Britain, and in 2002 he won an Eric Gregory Award. He lives in the North East and teaches at the University of Newcastle.