Jessica Le Bas

Le Bas received her MA(Hons) from the University of Auckland.[1]

During the Balkan Wars, Le Bas worked for the United Nations as a Training Consultant for UNPROFOR. She has worked at the Beehive 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.[1]

Le Bas has published two collections of poetry, Incognito in 2007,[2] and Walking to Africa in 2009.[3] In 2010, she published her first children's book, Staying Home: My True Diary of Survival, under the pseudonym ‘Jesse O’.[4] In 2021 the novel was re-released by Penguin Books New Zealand as Locked Down, and was illustrated by Toby Morris.[5] Le Bas and her novel featured at the 2021 Auckland Writers' Festival as part of the Schools' Programme.[6]

Poems by Le Bas have appeared in Landfall,[7] Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook,[8] and the Best New Zealand Poems series in 2007.[9] She has also published in a number of other literary journals including Sport,[10] Blackmail Press,[11][12] and Trout.[13] She was featured in issue 32 of Poetry New Zealand.[14]

Incognito won the 2007 NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards.[15]

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.[1][16]

Le Bas has also won the New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition, 2005 Bravado Poetry Competition,[14] and been shortlisted in the Landfall Essay Competition.[1][17]

In 2019, she won the 2019 Sarah Broom Poetry Prize[18] with a short collection of poems titled Large Ocean Islands that arose from living and working in the Cook Islands between 2017 and 2020.[19]