Jessica Traynor is a poet and poetry editor at Banshee. Jessica’s poetry collections include Liffey Swim (Dedalus Press, 2014), which was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award, and The Quick (Dedalus Press, 2018) which was an Irish Times Book of the Year. Pit Lullabies (Bloodaxe, 2022) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, an Irish Times book of the year, and a Guardian Best Summer Read of 2022. It was shortlisted for the Yeats Society Sligo/ Irish Independent Poetry Prize.

Essays and articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Dial, Longreads.com, The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review, The Irish Times, Paper Visual Art, Tolka, Winter Papers, RTÉ’s Arena, and RTÉ/ New Island’s Sunday Miscellany 50. In 2019, she co-edited Correspondences: an anthology to call for an end to direct provision in support of MASI with the actor Stephen Rea.

She is a 2025 EU Press Prize Laureate, was 2024 recipient of the Tundish Award from Field Day for contributions to the arts in Ireland, and the 2023 recipient of the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry. Her fourth poetry collection, New Arcana, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2025 and was an RTÉ and Irish Independent book of the year.

Image by Bríd O’Donovan