Kate Clanchy
Encyclopedia

Life

She was educated in Edinburgh
Edinburgh
Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland, the second largest city in Scotland, and the eighth most populous in the United Kingdom. The City of Edinburgh Council governs one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas. The council area includes urban Edinburgh and a rural area...

 and Oxford University. She lived in London's East End for several years, before moving to Oxfordshire where she now works as a teacher, journalist and freelance writer.

Her poetry and seven radio plays have been broadcast by BBC Radio. She is a regular contributor to The Guardian newspaper; her work appeared in The Scotsman, the New Statesman and Poetry Review. She also writes for radio and broadcasts on the World Service and BBC Radio 3 and 4. 2009. She is a Creative Writing Fellow of Oxford Brookes University and teaches Creative Writing at the Arvon Foundation. She is currently one of the writers-in-residence at the charity First Story
First Story
First Story is a literary charity. It was founded in 2007 by Katie Waldegrave and the writer William Fiennes to improve literacy and foster creativity in young people through creative writing...

. Her poetry has been included in A Book of Scottish Verse (2002) and The Edinburgh book of twentieth-century Scottish poetry (2006)

Prizes and awards

  • 1994 Eric Gregory Award
    Eric Gregory Award
    The Eric Gregory Award is given by the Society of Authors to British poets under 30 on submission. The awards are up to a sum value of £24000 annually....

  • 1996 Forward Poetry Prize
    Forward Poetry Prize
    The Forward Poetry Prizes were created in 1991. The aim of the prizes is to extend the audience for contemporary poetry. Until the T.S. Eliot Prize remuneration was increased to £15,000 plus £1000 to each of nine runners-up, the Forward was the United Kingdom's most valuable annual poetry...

     (Best First Collection) for Slattern
  • 1996 London Arts Board New Writer Award
  • 1996 Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award for Slattern
  • 1996 Scottish Arts Council Book Award for Slattern
  • 1997 Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize
    John Llewellyn Rhys Prize
    The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize is a literary prize awarded annually for the best work of literature by an author from the Commonwealth aged 35 or under, written in English and published in the United Kingdom...

      (shortlist) for Slattern
  • 1997 Somerset Maugham Award
    Somerset Maugham Award
    The Somerset Maugham Award is a British literary prize given each May by the Society of Authors. It is awarded to whom they judge to be the best writer or writers under the age of thirty-five of a book published in the past year. The prize was instituted in 1947 by William Somerset Maugham and thus...

     for Slattern
  • 1999 Forward Poetry Prize
    Forward Poetry Prize
    The Forward Poetry Prizes were created in 1991. The aim of the prizes is to extend the audience for contemporary poetry. Until the T.S. Eliot Prize remuneration was increased to £15,000 plus £1000 to each of nine runners-up, the Forward was the United Kingdom's most valuable annual poetry...

     (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) (shortlist) for Samarkand
  • 1999 Scottish Arts Council Book Award for Samarkand
  • 2004 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) (shortlist) for Newborn
  • 2009 Scottish Arts Council Book Award for What Is She Doing Here?: A Refugee's Story
  • 2009 Writers' Guild Award for Best Book ( What is She Doing Here)
  • 2009 BBC National Short Story Prize for The Not-Dead and The Saved

Reviews

Lorna Gibb in The Independent commented:
Kate Clanchy's new book, What Is She Doing Here?, can be described as a memoir of her relationship with a Kosovan refugee, Antigona, but it is much more than that. Antigona escapes from her devastated village by way of Italy to London, where she meets, befriends and is employed by Clanchy. The bond between the two women is fraught but strong, caught in the contradiction of their roles as employer, employee and friend. But, as Clanchy finds the words to write Antigona's story, we begin to hear Antigona's own voice, one that both educates and angers the narrator, and, above all, makes her question many things about her life.


Marina Benjamin in The Telegraph wrote:
Clanchy has done a marvellous thing. By giving voice to a refugee and telling a story that would otherwise have gone unheard, she reminds us both of the solidarity that exists between women, and of how far feminism - not just as an ideology, but as a system governing economic transaction - has yet to go.


The critic Deryn Rees-Jones has said:
Kate Clanchy is notable for her tightly-written lyrics that explore thirtysomething life in the post-feminist era. Newborn, her third collection of poems, depends largely on a sense of recognition. It attempts to draw on common experiences of women, and the unfamiliar world they enter once they have boarded the pregnancy train and realise, to use Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. Born in Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College, Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer...

's metaphor, that "there's no getting off".

External links

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