Jen Hadfield (Cheshire, 1978) is one of the youngest poets to win the T. S. Eliot Prize, with her 2008 collection Nigh-No-Place. Her poetry features the Shetland Islands, where she now lives, and Canada, the country of her mother, again and again. Hadfield visualizes ‘these places she ever called home’ in a lively manner with musical, rhythmic poems – in which nature, language, dialect or, in essence, the locale stands at the center. Nonetheless, her poems are universal and worldly. Hadfield’s work is quirky and original, and oscillates from subject to subject, and from approach to approach, as a boat making the crossings to her home island.

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