Jane McLaughlin has always lived in or near London, has strong family connections with South Wales and shares a small boat on a rural stretch of the Medway. She works as a freelance in further education and academic publishing.
 
Her poetry has been widely published in magazines and anthologies and she has many competition successes including: longlisted in the National Poetry Competition, Highly Commended in the Torbay Open, third in the Hippocrates Open Prize for Poetry and Medicine, winner of the Cinnamon Press debut collection award.
 
Her collection Lockdown (2016) is published by Cinnamon Press. ‘a breath-taking beautifully-paced display’ (Katherine Gallagher); ‘flashes of brilliance everywhere’ (Matthew Francis); ‘We can live in and learn from these poems’ (Wendy French).
 
Her themes include exile and alienation, and people who struggle with inner-city life. Also how myth and history shape our imagination, how landscape and the natural world involve us in events and ideas bigger than our own lives, giving us unique and astonishing moments of insight, emotion or vision.
 
Jane also writes fiction and has won several awards for short stories and has published a ‘crossover’ e-novella.
 
She belongs to several writers’ groups whose feedback she finds invaluable and shares the co-ordination of the South East London Stanza in Greenwich (Meantime Poets).
 
She ensures that her readings are varied and engaging and invariably receives very positive comments from audiences.
 
Jane has taught writing of all kinds to adults and is an experienced workshop facilitator, mentor and editor. She is available for workshops and one-to-one. She is qualified to work with speakers of languages other than English and speaks French and Italian.
 
Jane believes that poetry is more important now as a civilising and unifying force than it has ever been and feels incredibly fortunate to be a writer of it.
 
Other Publications:
Her Wings of Glass, 2014, ISBN 978-0-9927088-0-1
and Fanfare, 2015, ISBN 978-0-9927088-1-8, Second Light Publications
Uncompassed, Cold Weather Shelter Anthology 2016, Salmon Poetry
Hippocrates Prize anthologies, Hippocrates Press,
2014: ISBN 978-0-9572571-3-9 and 2016: ISBN 978-0-9572571-9-1
and Featured Writer (three poemss) in Orbis 146, Winter 2008, ISSN 0300-4425