Jamie McKendrick

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Jamie McKendrick (born 27 October 1955) is a British poet and translator.

McKendrick was born in Liverpool, 27 October 1955, and educated at the Quaker school, Bootham, York, and Liverpool College. He studied English Literature at the University of Nottingham and graduated in 1975 at the age of 20. Between 1985 and 1987, he worked in a team of language teachers at the University of Salerno.

He has occasionally tutored at Hertford College, Oxford, the University of Gothenburg, Jan Masaryk University in Brno, the University of Nottingham and University College London. He teaches part-time for the Oxford programmes of Stanford University and Sarah Lawrence and offers a translation workshop for the Creative Writing MSt. also at Oxford.

McKendrick has published seven collections of poetry and two Selected Poems. He is also the editor of The Faber Book of 20th-Century Italian Poems (2004).

McKendrick has written reviews and essays on literature and art for numerous newspapers and magazines, including the TLS, the LRB, Independent on Sunday, The Atheaneum Review and Modern Painters. His essays have been published in several books including: Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery; Writers on Art; Literary Activism; he has also written catalogue essays for exhibitions by Arturo Di Stefano and Donald Wilkinson, and an introduction to Tom Lubbock's English Graphic (Francis Lincoln, 2012).

A collection of his writings on art, poetry and translation, The Foreign Connection, was published by Legenda, 2020, ISBN 978-1-78188-500-0

McKendrick has translated six books of fiction by the Italian novelist Giorgio Bassani, including The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, published as individual volumes by Penguin and, for the first time in English, in a collected edition by Penguin and by Norton in the US.

McKendrick was named as one of the Poetry Society's 'New Generation' poets in the 1990s, with the Society selecting his 1997 collection Marble Fly as a Poetry Society Book Choice. McKendrick's collections was shortlisted for the 1997 and 2003 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 2003 Whitbread Poetry Award, and the 2007 Forward Poetry Prize. His translations of Giorgio Bassani were shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld prize and for the John Florio award.

Awards received include:

• 2020 Michael Marks Illustration Award (for The Years)
• 2020 Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet Award (for The Years) [shortlisted]
• 2019 Cholmondeley Award 
• 2016 John Florio Italian Translation Award for Antonella Anedda's Archipelago
• 2014 Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
• 2013 Hawthornden Prize for Out There
• 2010 John Florio Italian Translation Award for Valerio Magrelli The Embrace
• 2010 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for Valerio Magrelli's The Embrace
• 2005 Cavaliere OSSI (Ordine della Stella della Solidarietà Italiana)
• 2003 Society of Authors Travel Award
• 1997 Forward Prize for Best Collection for The Marble Fly
• 1994 Southern Arts Literature Award (for The Kiosk on the Brink)
• 1991 Arts Council Writers' Award
• 1984 Eric Gregory Award

• The Sirocco Room (Oxford University Press, 1991)
• The Kiosk on the Brink (Oxford University Press, 1993)
• The Marble Fly (Oxford University Press, 1997)
• Sky Nails: Poems 1979–1997 (Faber and Faber, 2000)
• Ink Stone (Faber and Faber, 2003)
• Crocodiles and Obelisks (Faber and Faber, 2007)
• Out There (Faber and Faber, 2012)
• The Hunters – pamphlet with French and Italian translations (Incline Press, 2015)
• Selected Poems (Faber and Faber, 2016)
• Repairwork – pamphlet (Clutag Press, 5 poems series, 2017)
• Anomaly (Faber and Faber, 2018)
• The Years – pamphlet illustrated by the author (Arc Publications, 2020)

• Giorgio Bassani: The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Penguin, 2007, republished Folio, 2014)
• Valerio Magrelli: The Embrace: Selected Poems (Faber and Faber, 2009, republished in a bilingual edition as Vanishing Points by Farrar Straus Giroux, 2011)
• Pier Paolo Pasolini: Fabrication, a translation of the verse play Affabulazione, (Oberon, 2010). Performed at The Printhouse, London in 2010, directed by Lucy Bailey.
• David Huerta: Poemas/Poems (Poetry Translation Centre pamphlet, 2010)
• Giorgio Bassani: The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles (Penguin, 2012)
• Giorgio Bassani: The Smell of Hay (Penguin, 2014)
• Antonella Anedda: Archipelago (Bloodaxe, 2016)
• Giorgio Bassani:  Within the Walls (Penguin, 2016)
• Giorgio Bassani:  Behind the Door (Penguin, 2017)
• Giorgio Bassani: The Heron (2018)
• Giorgio Bassani: The Novel of Ferrara (Penguin, 2018, Norton, 2018)

McKendrick's poems have appreared in translation in France, Italy, Germany, in Sweden, Holland, Turkey, Iran, Spain, and Argentina. Other translations have been published as books in Holland, Italy, Sweden and Spain:

• Een versteende dierentuin: Gedichten translated by Ko Kooman (Wagner & Van Santen, Sliedrecht, 2000)
• Chiodi di cielo, translated by Luca Guerneri and Antonella Anedda (Donzelli, Rome, 2003)
• En förlorad stad, translated by Lars-Håkan Svennson and Lasse Söderberg (Bokförlaget Faethon, Stockholm, 2020)
• Un perro verde, translated by Nieves García Prados (Valparaíso, Granada, 2021)

• Podcast Interview with Jamie McKendrick by André Naffis-Sahely
• "An Interview with Jamie McKendrick" in the Oxonian Review^[usurped]
• Poetry Archive - Jamie McKendrick
• British Council Website - Contemporary Writers
• Isis Magazine - 'Jamie McKendrick on Crocodiles and Obelisks and the Blank Page...'