Janet Hatherley is a London poet whose work has been published in several journals and online magazines, including The Interpreter’s House, Under the Radar, Stand, Coast to Coast to Coast, ARTEMISpoetry and Spelt, among others. In 2021, she won third prize in Second Light Poetry Competition. She was highly commended in Ver Poetry Competition, 2022. She won second prize in Enfield Poetry Competition, 2023.
 
Review comments:
 
on her debut poetry pamphlet, 2022, What Rita Tells Me –
 

… Her lightness of touch makes this family history so easy to read – each house move, new neighbour, new school, her mother’s every coping strategy, her father’s heroic persistence through illness, what she and her friends – the marvellous Rita – and her siblings get up to. No matter what life throws at them, on they go. The only disappointment I had with this book was coming to the end of it.

Sam Smith, The Journal

on her on her first collection, 2024, On the road to Cadianda –
 

Janet Hatherley, an expert storyteller, combines formal craft with an intense appreciation and respect for the world she finds herself in. The poems set in Türkiye, where Hatherley taught in the 1980s and to where she often returns, are alert to life in all its myriad forms, whether it is tortoises mating, a snake that can kill a cow with one bite, or a stork making its nest on a mosque’s silver dome. Beyond vivid encounters with the environment, is the stretch of history, and an understanding of where we are now and where we have come from. Lycians, Romans, saints, farmers, and traders are conjured across the centuries in shimmering lyrical poems that advocate and celebrate shared understandings. Hatherley is conscious of “the wind in the pines” blowing through the landscape, and the lessons it whispers.

Lisa Kelly, poet and editor at Magma