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Polly Clark (born 1968) is a Canadian-born British writer and poet. [1] She is the author of Larchfield (2017), which fictionalised a youthful period in the life of poet W. H. Auden, and Tiger (2019) about a last dynasty of wild Siberian tigers. She has published four critically acclaimed volumes of poetry. She lives in Helensburgh, Scotland.
Clark was born in Toronto and came to the UK as a child, growing up in Cumbria, Lancashire and the Scottish Borders. [1] Between 2007 and 2017 she produced the Literature Programme at Cove Park, Scotland's International Artist Residency Centre, near Helensburgh. [2] She was Poet in Residence for the Southern Daily Echo. [3] [4] and chaired and presented the author Richard Ford on an Arts Council England funded tour of theatres in south east England in 2004. [1] She has held a variety of other jobs to support her writing, including a period as a teacher of English in Hungary, working in publishing at Oxford University Press, [5] and as a zookeeper at Edinburgh Zoo. [6]
Since winning the Eric Gregory Award for young poets in 1997, [7] she has published three full collections of poetry and one pamphlet. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and the Michael Marks Award.
Her first novel, Larchfield, was published in March 2017 and is based on the little known period spent by W. H. Auden as a teacher at the Larchfield Academy, now amalgamated into Lomond School, in Helensburgh, Scotland (where he wrote The Orators ). [2] Larchfield won the 2015 Mslexia Women's Novel Competition (under its draft title, When Auden Met Dora). [8] It received praise from Margaret Atwood, Richard Ford and Louis de Bernieres. [9] David Robinson in The National and Books from Scotland calls it "layered, clever, captivating". [2] John Boyne 'Magical and transcendent . . . I suspect that few debuts in 2017 will match the elegance of Larchfield. This is a beautiful novel: passionate, lyrical and surprising. I will remember Larchfield for a long time.'. [10] Stuart Kelly in The Scotsman was critical, saying "it is not a work for which I would recommend a reader parting with money". [11]
In 2017, Clark contributed to a BBC2 documentary on Auden's life, directed by BAFTA winning Adam Low [12] and wrote a piece for the Guardian on childbirth. [13] With the poet Glyn Maxwell and the writer and cultural commentator Matthew Sweet she discussed W.H. Auden's Age of Anxiety on BBC Radio 3 for the 2018 BBC Proms Production of Leonard Bernstein's symphonic interpretation of the poet's work: Age of Anxiety. [14]
Writing in the Guardian, Liz Jensen placed Clark's 'unsettling and immersive' second novel Tiger in a vanguard of books along with Laline Paull's The Bees and Richard Powers's The Overstory which approach non-human life in new ways. [15] Allan Massie in The Scotsman described it as 'magnificent and terrifying', adding that the novel 'will doubtless sell very well – and deservedly so' [16] To research the novel Clark undertook a tiger tracking expedition to the remote Russian taiga. [17] Tiger was shortlisted in 2019 Saltire Book of the Year Awards.
Fleur Adcock is a New Zealand poet and editor, of English and Northern Irish ancestry, who has lived much of her life in England. She is well-represented in New Zealand poetry anthologies, was awarded an honorary doctorate of literature from Victoria University of Wellington, and was awarded an OBE in 1996 for her contribution to New Zealand literature. In 2008 she was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to literature.
Helen Dunmore FRSL was a British poet, novelist, and short story and children's writer.
Pascale Petit, is a French-born British poet of French, Welsh and Indian heritage. She was born in Paris and grew up in France and Wales. She trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art and was a visual artist for the first part of her life. She has travelled widely, particularly in the Peruvian and Venezuelan Amazon and India.
The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is a prize for poetry awarded by the T. S. Eliot Foundation. For many years it was awarded by the Eliots' Poetry Book Society (UK) to "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday and in honour of its founding poet, T. S. Eliot. Since its inception, the prize money was donated by Eliot's widow, Valerie Eliot and more recently it has been given by the T. S. Eliot Estate.
Ruth Sophia Padel FRSL FZS is a British poet, novelist and non-fiction author, known for her poetic explorations of migration, both animal and human, and her involvement with classical music, wildlife conservation and Greece, ancient and modern. She is Trustee for conservation charity New Networks for Nature, has served on the board of the Zoological Society of London and was Professor of Poetry at King's College London from 2013 to 2022.
Jacqueline Margaret Kay,, is a Scottish poet, playwright, and novelist, known for her works Other Lovers (1993), Trumpet (1998) and Red Dust Road (2011). Kay has won many awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award in 1994, the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1998 and the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award in 2011.
Caitríona O'Reilly is an Irish poet and critic.
Imtiaz Dharker is a Pakistan-born British poet, artist, and video film maker. She won the Queen's Gold Medal for her English poetry and was appointed Chancellor of Newcastle University from January 2020.
Roderick Chalmers "Roddy" Lumsden was a Scottish poet, writing mentor and quizzer. He was born in St Andrews and educated at Madras College and the University of Edinburgh. He published seven collections of poetry, a number of pamphlets and a collection of trivia. He also edited a generational anthology of British and Irish poets of the 1990s and 2000s, Identity Parade, and The Salt Book of Younger Poets. His collections The Book of Love and So Glad I'm Me were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.
Tishani Doshi FRSL is an Indian poet, journalist and dancer based in Chennai. In 2006 she won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection due to Countries of the Body. Her poetry book A God at the Door was later shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Collection. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.
Lavinia Elaine Greenlaw is an English poet, novelist and non-fiction writer. She won the Prix du Premier Roman with her first novel and her poetry has been shortlisted for awards that include the T. S. Eliot Prize, Forward Prize and Whitbread Poetry Prize. She was shortlisted for the 2014 Costa Poetry Award for A Double Sorrow: A Version of Troilus and Criseyde. Greenlaw currently holds the post of Professor of Creative Writing (Poetry) at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Angela Readman is a British poet and short story writer.
Kapka Kassabova is a poet and writer of fiction and narrative non-fiction. She is a bilingual writer in English which is her main literary language and in Bulgarian which is her mother tongue. Her books are translated into twenty languages.
Selima Hill is a British poet. She has published twenty poetry collections since 1984. Her 1997 collection, Violet, was shortlisted for the most important British poetry awards: the Forward Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award. She was selected as recipient of the 2022 King's Gold Medal for Poetry.
Arundhathi Subramaniam is an Indian poet and author, who has written about culture and spirituality.
John Glenday grew up in Monifieth.
Regi Claire, is a novelist, short story writer and poet living and working in Scotland. Her native language is Swiss-German, but she writes in English, her fourth language.
Sasha Dugdale FRSL is a British poet, playwright, editor and translator. She has written five poetry collections and is a translator of Russian literature.
Claire Askew is a Scottish novelist and poet.
Beda Higgins is a poet and writer living in Newcastle upon Tyne.
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