Hadfield's poems and visual art are based on her experience of living, working and traveling in Shetland and the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, and Canada.[2] In her work as an artist, she often uses found objects, salvage materials and ocean detritus.[1]
Themes in Hadfield's poems include home and belonging, wildness and subsistence, landscape and language, and the Shetland dialect.[2]
Biography
Jen Hadfield was born in 1978 to a Canadian mother and a British father.[4] She grew up in Cheshire, England.[2] She obtained a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Edinburgh. Later, she was awarded a joint creative writing MLitt (with Distinction) from the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde.[2]
Hadfield has been a professional poet since 2002.[5] In 2003, she won the Eric Gregory Award, which enabled a year of travel and writing in Canada.[2] Her first collection, Almanacs (Bloodaxe Books, 2005) was written in Shetland and the Western Isles in 2002, thanks to a bursary from the Scottish Arts Council. Her second collection, Nigh–No–Place (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), inspired by her travels in Shetland and Canada, was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2008.[6] Hadfield was winner of the Edwin Morgan International Poetry Award in 2012.[7] and selected in 2014 as one of "Next Generation Poets", a promotion organised by the Poetry Book Society. Her fourth collection, The Stone Age, won the Highland Book Prize in 2021.[8] Other honours include the Scottish Arts Council Bursary Award, and residencies with the Shetland Arts Trust and the Scottish Poetry Library.[1][2][9]
Making artists' books is part of Hadfield's work. She collaborated with printer Ursula Freeman of Redlake Press on The Printer’s Devil and the Little Bear (2006), a limited edition handmade book that combined traditional letterpress techniques and laserprint. The book is illustrated with Hadfield's photographs of Canada.[2]
In 2007, a Dewar Award enabled Hadfield to travel in Mexico and research Mexican devotional folk art. She "created a solo exhibition of 'Shetland ex-votos in the style of sacred Mexican folk art' – tiny, portable, insistently familiar landscapes packed in an array of weathered tobacco tins."[2]
Hadfield lives on Burra in Shetland, where she works as a poet and writing tutor.[9][3] She has a partner and a child.[11]
Hadfield has said "We live in painful times, in a difficult world, and yet the world is still overwhelmingly magical. Poetry gives us a chance to stop, reflect, process, cope, grieve and revere".[12]
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