Jessica Traynor

Jessica Traynor was selected for the 2025 Shortlist with Memory Machines.

Jessica Traynor is a poet, essayist, librettist and poetry editor at Banshee Press. Her third collection, Pit Lullabies, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2022 and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was a Guardian summer read of 2022, and was an Irish Times book of the year. She was a judge for the 2023 Forward Prizes and reviews fiction and non-fiction for The Irish Times. Her next collection, New Arcana, will be published in September 2025.

Non-fiction, articles and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Irish Times, The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review, Paper Visual Art, Banshee, Tolka, We Are Dublin, Winter Papers, RTÉ’s Arena, and RTÉ/ New Island’s Sunday Miscellany 50. Her work in progress collection of essays, The World Gets In, was longlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Editions Prize and the Deborah Rogers Foundation Award in 2021. Her article Memory Machines was commissioned by The Dial, and republished as The Guardian long read in February 2024.

Awards include the 2024 Tundish Award from Field Day for contributions to the arts in Ireland, the 2023 Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary, Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year and the Listowel Poetry Prize. She has worked as Deputy Museum Director for EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum and as Literary Manager for the Abbey Theatre, Ireland’s National Theatre.