Jennifer Rankin

Who was Jennifer Rankin?

Jennifer Rankin was a 20th-century Australian poet and playwright. Rankin was born in and grew up in Sydney and went to Ravenswood Methodist School. She then studied English and Psychology at University of Sydney and completed a Diploma of Education at UNE in 1968. She worked mainly in education in Australia and England.

She married first John Roberts and secondly the painter David Rankin.

Her first surviving poems date from 1969, her first play, untitled, from 1973. Some of her plays, there are eight in all, were produced for stage and radio during her lifetime. She received an Australia Council Senior Literary Fellowship in 1978 and had two books of poems published. Her Collected Poems was edited posthumously by Judith Rodriguez and published in 1990.