Jenny Lewis is a poet, playwright, translator and songwriter who teaches poetry at Oxford University. She has published five collections of poetry and had seven plays and poetry cycles performed with music and dance at major UK theatres including the Royal Festival Hall and Pegasus Theatre, Oxford for which she wrote Map of Stars (2002), Garden of the Senses (2005), After Gilgamesh (2012) and, with Yasmin Sidhwa and Adnan Al-Sayegh, Journeys to Freedom: A Retelling of the 1001 Arabian Nights (2015). Jenny’s first poetry book was When I Became an Amazon (Iron Press, 1996/ Bilingua, Russia 2002) which was dramatized, broadcast on BBC Woman’s Hour and the BBC World Service and made into a opera performed by the Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Company (2017) and by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra for International Women’s Day (2023). Her later collections include Fathom (Oxford Poets/ Carcanet, 2007), Taking Mesopotamia (Oxford Poets/ Carcanet, 2014), Gilgamesh Retold (Carcanet Classics, 2018) which was a New Statesman Book of the Year, an LRB Bookshop Book of the Week and Carcanet’s first ever audiobook; and From Base Materials (Carcanet, 2024).
Jenny has also published three chapbooks from Mulfran Press in English and Arabic with the exiled Iraqi poet Adnan Al-Sayegh which are part of the award-winning, Arts Council-funded ‘ Writing Mesopotamia’ project aimed at building bridges between English and Arabic-speaking communities. The project included collaborations with artists, musicians and film-makers; seminars and readings at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the British Museum and the Iraqi Embassy; and a song, ‘Anthem for Gilgamesh’ which has had over 100,000 hits on YouTube and Arab websites. Let me tell you what I saw, Jenny’s translation (with others) of extracts from Adnan’s work, was published by Seren in 2020.
Jenny’s poems, reviews and articles have been published by leading journals, including Long Poem Magazine, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, PN Review, The Cork Literary Review, The Daily Telegraph, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The High Window, The Poetry Review and World Literature Today. Her most recent work is a sequence of ecopoems included in Seed Guardians, written and directed by Yasmin Sidhwa, for Mandala Theatre Company, first performed at The North Wall, Oxford then touring to the Midlands, the North of England and London, October-November 2024. It won a Joseph Rowntree Award in 2025.
Jenny’s writing for children includes a twenty-six-part children’s TV animation series, James the Cat, co-written, with its creator, Kate Canning and first shown in 1998. Her song-writing credits include ‘17 Pink Sugar Elephants’ with Vashti Bunyan (1963), later developed with new lyrics by Alasdair Clayre into the iconic ‘Train Song’ which has been used on TV commercials (Reebok and Samsung) as well as for the hit US shows True Detective and Patriot and been streamed over 20 million times.
In March 2021, Jenny completed a PhD on translating Gilgamesh at Goldsmiths, University of London. You can read the thesis here: https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/30429/1/ENG_Thesis_LewisJ_2021.pdf
Jenny Lewis 