Jessica Le Bas

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]

In 2025, she placed third in the Te Tauihu Short Story Award^[20], was runner-up in the takahē (Monica Taylor) Poetry Competition^[21], and received a Highly Commended award in the Katherine Mansfield Sparkling Prose Competition.^[22]