Jo shapcott short biography

Shapcott, Jo - Encyclopedia.com

Jo Shapcott - Wikipedia.

Jo Shapcott

Biography

Jo Shapcott was born in 1953 in London and educated in Dublin and Oxford and at Harvard. She has worked extensively in universities and in arts education, including at the Arts Council and the Southbank Centre. In 1985 she won first prize in the Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition with ‘The Surrealists’ Summer Convention Came to Our City’, which was later included in her first collection, Electroplating the Baby(Bloodaxe), winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Collection.

Laden with deft, measured rhythms, but with a sense of colloquial spontaneity, her early poems could be described as Larkinesque, but with a great degree of irony in relation to Larkin’s prejudices. As she wrote in an early sonnet, ‘Country House Hotel’:

It’s like a comfy, undemanding club
where the guests blush when their feet ring on the floor
and where the world of Securicor and Chubb
is as rude and far off as a working whore.

If anything, her work is wel