Diane Jackman started as a writer of books and stories for younger children, but now concentrates on poetry. She has won several competitions and been widely published in the UK and USA. This year she is writer in residence for the Hysteria writing competition. Her first collection Lessons from the Orchard draws on her early life roaming the fields of a Midlands Farm among the ruins of a Jacobean dower house. It was a time of radical change in farming. She is currently writing a sequence of poems about the Fens, which allows her to walk the lonely roads and riverbanks in quiet places. Her poems are rooted in landscape and the effect of the past on the present.
