Jenny Joseph - Biography

Jenny Joseph (born 7 May 1932) is an English poet.

Life and career

She was born in Birmingham, and with a scholarship, studied English literature at St Hilda's College, Oxford (195).Her poems were first published when she was at university in the early 1950s. She became a journalist and worked for the Bedfordshire Times, the Oxford Mail and Drum Publications (Johannesburg, South Africa).

Joseph's best known poem, "Warning", was written in 1961 and is included in her 1974 collection Rose In the Afternoon and The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. "Warning" was identified as the UK's "most popular post-war poem" in a 1996 poll by the BBC. The second line was the inspiration for the Red Hat Society. Her first book of poems, The Unlooked-for Season won a Gregory Award in 1960 and she won a Cholmondeley Award for her second collection, Rose in the Afternoon in 1974.

Awards and honours

• 1960 Gregory Award for Unlooked-for Season
• 1974 Cholmondeley Award for Rose in the Afternoon
• 1986 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for her fiction Persepone
• 1995 Travelling scholarship by the Society of Authors.
• 1999 Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999.

Bibliography

• Unlooked-for Season (1960 - winner of a Gregory Award)
• Rose in the Afternoon (1974 - winner of a Cholmondeley Award)
• The Thinking Heart (1978)
• Beyond Descartes (1983)
• Persepone (1986 - fiction in verse and prose)
• Beached Boats (1992 - prose)
• The Inland Sea (1992)
• Selected Poems (1992) - which includes ("Warning")
• Ghosts and Other Company (1996)
• Extended Similes (1997 - prose fiction)
• Led by the Nose (2002)
• Extreme of Things (2006)
• Nothing Like Love (2009)

She has also written six books for children

External links

• Poetry Archive profile and poems written and audio
• Bloodaxe profile
• Article on Jenny Joseph
• Interview by BBC 25 February 2004