Alan Jenkins Biography

British poet, born in London, educated at the University of Sussex. In 1980 he began working on the Times Literary Supplement, of which he subsequently became deputy editor. He received an Eric Gregory Award for his poetry in 1981 and a selection of his work appeared in New Chatto Poets in 1986. In The Hothouse (1988), his first collection of verse, gained him wide notice as a strikingly individual and deftly accomplished poet. Greenheart (1990) and Harm (1994) are his principal subsequent publications. Jenkins is a poet of considerable imaginative scope, most evident in the unsettlingly inventive narrative of the title poem of Greenheart, and urgently contemporary concerns, notably in the acerbic reflections of metropolitan life in Harm. Powerfully candid treatments of personal relationships, often with a strong erotic component, are a recurrent feature of his poetry. He is the editor of Essential Reading (1986), a selection from Peter Reading's poetry.