Jenny Joseph was first published in the 1950s by John Lehmann. Her first published collection, The Unlooked-for Season, won her a Cholmondeley Award and her prose and verse narrative, Persephone, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 1995 she was awarded a Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship. In 2006 her poem 'Warning' was voted Britain's favourite modern poem. She had three grown-up children and lived in Gloucestershire. Jenny Joseph died in 2018, aged 85.