Mary Jean Chan

This month Suzannah V Evans takes over as host; she’s in conversation with Mary Jean Chan in an interview recorded at StAnza, Scotland’s poetry festival, earlier this year.

Chan was born in 1990 and raised in Hong Kong before continuing her education at the Universities of Oxford and London. She’s already been nominated for the Forward Prize for Poetry’s Best Single Poem category twice and earlier this year she won an Eric Gregory Award. Her first full-length collection Flèche has just been published by Faber.

During the podcast, Chan discusses fencing (where the term ‘flèche’ comes from), how learning English at a young age made her realise some languages are more valued than others, and queerness.