Jane Wickenden

Jane Wickenden

Jane Wickenden was born in Lewisham in 1961 and grew up in Surrey. She has a degree in English from Somerville College Oxford (with special options in Old and Middle English, Old Icelandic, Medieval Latin and Anglo-Saxon archaeology), and a Diploma in Librarianship from the College of Librarianship Wales. After working in Oxford University libraries for twelve years she married Robin in 1999, and now lives with him and several thousand books in a house in Somerset. Her current job, however, is with the Navy in Hampshire, where she works as Historic Collections Librarian for the Institute of Naval Medicine, curating and cataloguing the nineteenth-century libraries of the Royal Naval hospitals at Haslar and Plymouth, as well as answering reference and research enquiries on the history of naval medicine.

Jane has spoken at several conferences, including the Army Medical Services Museum’s “Securing the Ultimate Victory” 2007 and 2009, and the Cranfield Forensic Institute / Haslar Heritage Group conference of May 2013. She sails occasionally with the Jubilee Sailing Trust, and writes fiction in her spare time (her book Secret songs was shortlisted for the Guardian Children’s fiction award in 1997). Other interests include all aspects of the Middle Ages, particularly cathedral architecture.