Jen Hadfield

Shetlopedia - The Shetland Encyclopaedia

Jen Hadfield is a Shetland-based poet who was born in Cheshire in 1978, but has dual citizenship with Canada. Jen is a graduate of the University of Edinburgh, where she encountered the Shetland author Robert Alan Jamieson, and subsequently graduated with distinction from her Masters in Creative Writing at the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde, where she was tutored by Tom Leonard.

Jen was awarded a Scottish Arts Council Writer’s Bursary in 2002 to help her complete her first collection, Almanacs, published by Bloodaxe Books in 2005 to great acclaim. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2003. She has recently completed the manuscript of her second collection Nigh-No-Place. Her poem 'Towhee' won the Robert McLellan Award for 2006.

Jen moved to Shetland in 2006, after a fifteen-month spell in Canada: writing, travelling and performing her own work, accompanied by her singing. She is also a maker of artists' books.