About Jenny Palmer
Jenny was born and brought up in a small hamlet called Twiston in rural East Lancashire. After studying German at university, she spent some years teaching EFL in Libya, Spain and Mexico and travelled extensively in North Africa and South America. She wrote articles about the places she had visited and published them in small magazines like Spare Rib, Everywoman, The Tribune. She settled in London and taught The Vietnamese Boat People in Thameside and then immigrants and refugees in Hackney, where she lived.
After taking six-months’ unpaid leave to travel to Peru and Bolivia in1984, she joined a creative writing group, started writing short stories and embarked on her childhood memoir, to try to recapture her lost childhood. A few members in the writing group went on to co-edit four anthologies of women’s stories, which were published by the Women’s Press and Serpent’s Tail in the early 1990s. she completed her M.A. in ‘TESOL and Applied Linguistics’ in 1999 and continued teaching EAP in various universities, while writing in her spare time.
She returned to Lancashire in 2008. She now lives a stone’s throw away from her childhood home in Twiston, at the foot of Pendle Hill. Here she finished and self-published two memoirs, and a family history. She is a member of the Clitheroe Writing Group and Poetry Stanza. Her poems, short stories and local history articles have been published in various local anthologies, in the Lancashire History Quarterly, The Lancashire Evening Post and online by CaféLit.
PUBLICATIONS
SINGLE AUTHOR
Witches, Quakers and Nonconformists, 2022, available from the Pendle Heritage Centre, Barrowford
Pendle Poems 2019
Keepsake and other stories (2018, Bridge House) available from Amazon in paperback and on Kindle
Nowhere better than home 2012. (a childhood memoir) £4.99
Whipps, Watsons and Bulcocks a Pendle family history 1560-1960,’ 2014. £5.99
Pastures New 2016, (a sequel to the first memoir) £5.99
SHORT STORIES
The Best of CafeLit 13
Creative Mind Anthology 8
Her stories appeared in Northern Counties Collection, 2022, and Nature and Nurture anthology, 2021
Magnetism 2020
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ARTICLES
Articles on local history, Lancashire History Quarterly, Hudson History, Settle, 2002-2013
Chapters from ‘Nowhere better than home’ and ‘Pastures New’ in the Lancashire Evening Post, 2010-2017.
POEMS
Her poems appeared in New Contexts 1, 2021 and Worktownwords Anthologies,1 and 7, 2020.’
She is a regular contributor to Networds, online poetry magazine.
AWARDS AND COMPETITONS
Sewing Socks’ highly recommended in the Pendle War Poetry Competition, 2012
Butter Pats second prize in Age UK Poetry Competition, 2016
Find Jenny's work here.