Author: Jenna Clake

Jenna Clake writes poetry and fiction in Britain, examining intimacy, power, trauma, and the unstable stories people tell about themselves. Her poetry collection Fortune Cookie won the Melita Hume Prize and an Eric Gregory Award and was shortlisted for a Somerset Maugham Award. She also published the prose-poetry pamphlet CLAKE/Interview for with Verve Poetry Press. Disturbance marked her debut as a novelist, appearing through Trapeze in Britain and W. W. Norton in the United States. The book follows a young woman at university as friendship, desire, and an abusive relationship alter her understanding of memory and responsibility. Its interrogative structure and close attention to language connect the novel with Clake's work as a poet, while its treatment of coercion remains grounded in ordinary social settings. Bloodaxe later published her poetry collection Museum of Ice Cream. Disturbance therefore fits a career moving between verse and fiction, with each form used to test how wit, silence, and self-description can conceal or expose harm.