Carolyn Jess-Cooke

Carolyn Jess-Cooke (born 26 August 1978 in Belfast, Northern Ireland) is a poet and novelist from Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Early life Carolyn Jess-Cooke was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1978. She was educated at The Queen's University of Belfast, where she received a BA (Hons), MA, and PhD by the age of 25. At 26 she took up a lectureship in film studies at the University of Sunderland, where she established herself as a film theorist, publishing numerous articles and books and receiving a reference in Who's Who in Research: Film. She took up a senior lectureship in Creative Writing at the University of Northumbria in 2009 but tendered her resignation to write full-time in January 2011, and is currently Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. She has four children and lives outside Glasgow. Prominent themes in Jess-Cooke's work include trauma, motherhood, and feminism.

Career Jess-Cooke now publishes her fiction as CJ Cooke. She is the author of bestselling gothic novels, The Nesting (2020), which was published in 2021 in the UK and Commonwealth by HarperCollins, The Lighthouse Witches, which was nominated for ITW Thriller Awards and an Edgar Award from Mystery Writers of America, and optioned for a TV series by StudioCanal, and The Ghost Woods (2022), which was an Indigo Book of the Year 2022. Jess-Cooke regularly visits the place where she sets her books to carry out fieldwork and interviews.

Jess-Cooke's poetry has also appeared in Poetry Review, Poetry London, Poetry New Zealand, Poetry Ireland Review, The Wolf, Magma, Poetry Wales, The Lonely Poets' Guide to Belfast, Black Mountain Review, Ambit, Tower Poetry, The SHOp, and in a ribbon of steel that runs for half a mile throughout the Roseberry Park mental health hospital in Middlesbrough. Her debut poetry collection, Inroads, received an Eric Gregory Award, the Northern Promise Award, the Tyrone Guthrie Prize for Poetry, and was shortlisted for the New London Poetry Award in 2010.

In 2020, Jess-Cooke set up a virtual literary festival, The Stay-at-Home Literary Festival, which featured hundreds of writers, attracted audiences of over 15,000 and ran for two weeks throughout the pandemic.

Jess-Cooke is Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow where she leads research in the field of creative writing interventions for mental illness.