Jan Owen Australia

Born in Adelaide, Australia, Jan Owen studied arts at the University of Adelaide, then raised her children and worked as a librarian before turning to her own writing. Her poetry collections include Boy with a Telescope (1986), winner of the Anne Elder Award and the Mary Gilmore Award; Fingerprints on Light (1990); Blackberry Season (1993); Night Rainbows (1994); Timedancing (2002); and Poems 1980-2008 (2008).

Intellectually curious and wide ranging in her work, Owen contemplates family, travel, history, and childhood in both free verse and traditional forms. Australian Poetry Review described her work as moving “from the microscopic to the cosmic; from the present to the past (and vice versa); from the local to the exotic; from the abstract to the embodied and from the act of representing to the act of meditating.”

Owen has received the Wesley Michel Wright Poetry Prize, the Max Harris Award, and the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize. She has been a resident at the Cité des Arts in Paris and a fellow at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland.

(2015)