From Base Materials

Jenny Lewis is a poet, playwright, translator and songwriter who teaches poetry at Oxford University. She has had seven plays and poetry cycles performed at major UK theatres and published four collections; the most recent, Gilgamesh Retold (Carcanet, 2018), was a New Statesman Book of the Year, an LRB Bookshop Book of the Week and Carcanet's first audio book. Jenny has also published three chapbooks from Mulfran Press in English and Arabic with the exiled Iraqi poet Adnan Al-Sayegh which are part of the award-winning, Arts Council-funded 'Writing Mesopotamia' project aimed at building bridges between English and Arabic-speaking communities. Jenny's first book, When I Became an Amazon (Iron Press, 1996/ Bilingua, Russia, 2002) was set to music by Gennadyi Shiroglazov and performed by the Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Company in 2017 and, for International Women's Day 2023, by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Jenny's album of her 1960's songs, (including 'Seventeen Pink Sugar Elephants', co-written with Vashti Bunyan in 1963 and newly arranged and played by Vashti with Gareth Dickson) is forthcoming in 2024.