Janet Hancock

Born and brought up in Worcestershire, Janet Hancock trained as a teacher in Oxford and worked in Warwickshire, France and Hampshire before moving to Dorset over 30 years ago. For many years, she taught English in the south of England to military officers from the Middle East and francophone Africa.

Janet has had prize-winning and shortlisted short stories published in online and print anthologies. In 2018, she started writing poetry, seeing with new eyes the richness of language and the need to make every word count. Her poetry has been published in print and online.

History has always been Janet’s first love, especially the era after the First World War, a time of revolutions, collapse of centuries-old empires, and unprecedented social change. In long fiction, she explores how the events of those years impacted ordinary people. Her first novel, Beyond the Samovar, set in Russia and England 1919-20, was published in 2019. The West in Her Eyes, her second novel, was published by Resolute Books in July 2024.

Janet enjoys choral and chamber singing, cultivating the walled courtyard garden of her Edwardian townhouse, walking with others in the Dorset countryside, and buying books for small family-members.