Jessica Le Bas | |
|---|---|
 Le Bas at the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize ceremony at Auckland Writers Festival 2019, in Auckland, New Zealand | |
| Language | English |
| Alma mater | University of Auckland |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Notable works | Incognito, Walking to Africa |
| Notable awards | NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry, Sarah Broom Poetry Prize 2019 |
Jessica Le Bas is a Nelson-based poet from New Zealand.
Le Bas received her MA(Hons) from the University of Auckland. [1]
During the Balkan Wars, Le Bas worked for the United Nations as a Training Consultant for UNPROFOR. She has worked at the Beehive in Wellington as Private Secretary to a government Minister. She took Owen Marshall’s Fiction Writing Course at Aoraki Polytechnic in 1997, and later received a writers' grant from Creative New Zealand. [1]
Le Bas has published two collections of poetry, Incognito in 2007, [2] and Walking to Africa in 2009. [3] In 2010, she published her first children's book, Staying Home: My True Diary of Survival, under the pseudonym ‘Jesse O’. [4] In 2021 the novel was re-released by Penguin Books New Zealand as Locked Down, and was illustrated by Toby Morris. [5] Le Bas and her novel featured at the 2021 Auckland Writers' Festival as part of the Schools' Programme. [6]
Poems by Le Bas have appeared in Landfall [7] , Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook [8] , and the Best New Zealand Poems series in 2007. [9] She has also published in a number of other literary journals including Sport, [10] Blackmail Press, [11] [12] and Trout. [13] She was featured in issue 32 of Poetry New Zealand. [14]
Incognito won the 2007 NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards. [15]
In 2007, she received a New Zealand Mental Health Foundation Media Grant to write Walking to Africa, which was a finalist in the Ashton Wylie Book Awards. [1] [16]
Le Bas has also won the New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition, 2005 Bravado Poetry Competition, [14] and been shortlisted in the Landfall Essay Competition. [1] [17]
In 2019, she won the 2019 Sarah Broom Poetry Prize [18] with a short collection of poems titled Large Ocean Islands that arose from living and working in the Cook Islands between 2017 and 2020. [19]
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