Jessica Le Bas is a Nelson-based poet from New Zealand.

Background

Le Bas received her MA(Hons) from the

University of Auckland , mottoeng = By natural ability and hard work , established = 1883; years ago , endowment = NZD $293 million (31 December 2021) , budget = NZD $1.281 billion (31 December 2021) , chancellor = Cecilia Tarrant , vice_chancellor = Dawn F ...

Career

During the

Balkan Wars The Balkan Wars refers to a series of two conflicts that took place in the Balkan States in 1912 and 1913. In the First Balkan War, the four Balkan States of Greece, Serbia, Montenegro and Bulgaria declared war upon the Ottoman Empire and defe ...

, Le Bas worked for the

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and international security, security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be ...

as a Training Consultant for

UNPROFOR The United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR; also known by its French acronym FORPRONU: ''Force de Protection des Nations Unies'') was the first United Nations peacekeeping force in Croatia and in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Yugoslav War ...

. She has worked at the

Beehive A beehive is an enclosed structure in which some honey bee species of the subgenus '' Apis'' live and raise their young. Though the word ''beehive'' is commonly used to describe the nest of any bee colony, scientific and professional literature ...

in Wellington as Private Secretary to a government Minister. She took Owen Marshall’s Fiction Writing Course at Aoraki Polytechnic in 1997, and later received a writers' grant from

Creative New Zealand The Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa (Creative New Zealand) is the national arts development agency of the New Zealand government, investing in artists and arts organisations, offering capability building programmes and developing markets ...

. Le Bas has published two collections of poetry, ''Incognito'' in 2007, and ''Walking to Africa'' in 2009. In 2010, she published her first children's book, ''Staying Home: My True Diary of Survival'', under the pseudonym ‘Jesse O’. In 2021 the novel was re-released by Penguin Books New Zealand as ''Locked Down'', and was illustrated by Toby Morris. Le Bas and her novel featured at the 2021

Auckland Writers' Festival Auckland Writers Festival Waituhi o Tāmaki is the largest annual literary festival in Aotearoa New Zealand since 1999. It has about 200 public events each year featuring local and international writers as guests. History and staff The inaug ...

as part of the Schools' Programme. Poems by Le Bas have appeared in ''Landfall'', ''Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook'', and the ''Best New Zealand Poems'' series in 2007. She has also published in a number of other literary journals including ''Sport,'' ''Blackmail Press,'' and ''Trout.'' She was featured in issue 32 of ''Poetry New Zealand''.

Awards

''Incognito'' won the 2007 NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry at the

Montana New Zealand Book Awards The Ockham New Zealand Book Awards are literary awards presented annually in New Zealand. The awards began in 1996 as the merger of two literary awards events: the New Zealand Book Awards, which ran from 1976 to 1995, and the Goodman Fielder W ...

. In 2007, she received a New Zealand Mental Health Foundation Media Grant to write ''Walking to Africa'', which was a finalist in the Ashton Wylie Book Awards. Le Bas has also won the New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition, 2005 ''Bravado'' Poetry Competition, and been shortlisted in the

Landfall Landfall is the event of a storm moving over land after being over water. More broadly, and in relation to human travel, it refers to 'the first land that is reached or seen at the end of a journey across the sea or through the air, or the fact ...

Essay Competition. In 2019, she won the 2019

Sarah Broom Poetry Prize The Sarah Broom Poetry Prize is one of New Zealand's most valuable poetry prizes. It was established to celebrate the life and work of New Zealand poet Sarah Broom. The prize was first awarded in 2014. History The Sarah Broom Poetry Prize was e ...

with a short collection of poems titled ''Large Ocean Islands'' that arose from living and working in the Cook Islands between 2017 and 2020.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Le Bas, Jessica Living people University of Auckland alumni New Zealand fiction writers New Zealand women poets Writers from Nelson, New Zealand Year of birth missing (living people)