Jay Bernard

Jay Bernard (FRSL) is a multidisciplinary writer and artist from London whose work is rooted in social histories. Jay was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2020 and winner of the 2017 Ted Hughes Award for their first collection Surge, a queer exploration of the archives surrounding the 1981 New Cross Fire. Recent work includes Joint, a poetic-play about the history of joint enterprise, Crystals of this Social Substance, a sound installation at the Serpentine pavilion in which eight young people explore the concept of money, Complicity, a pamphlet that explores the changing face of London via the Tate collection, and ‘You Are Invited Back to the Land’, a graphic intervention displayed in Tate Britain’s 1980s gallery. Jay received a 2022–23 DAAD literature fellowship in Berlin and a 2023–24 fellowship at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

jaybernard.co.uk