British writer
Kate Clanchy MBE (born 1965 in Glasgow, Scotland) is a British poet, freelance writer and teacher.
Life
She was born in 1965 in Glasgow to medieval historian Michael Clanchy and teacher Joan Clanchy (née Milne)[1][2] She was educated at George Watson's College in Edinburgh and at the University of Oxford, where she studied English.[3]
She lived in London's East End for several years, before moving to Oxford where she was a fellow of Oxford Brookes University and served as City Poet.[4] She is Writer in Residence for Sanctuary Arts[5] at Mansfield College, Oxford.
In 2021 she wrote an essay about the deaths of both her parents from COVID-19.[6]
Literary Career
Clanchy won an Eric Gregory Award in 1995[7]. She published three poetry collections between 1996 and 2004. They won a Forward Prize[8], the Scottish First Book of the Year (then Saltire Prize) two Scottish Arts Council Book Awards, and a Somerset Maugham Award [9]. In 2008, she moved into non fiction with a memoir about her relationship with her Kosovan neighbour. What is She Doing Here? This was republished as Antigona and Me and won the Writers Guild Award[10].
In 2009 she won both the VS Pritchett and BBC National Short Story Award.[11] This was followed by a novel, Meeting the English,[12] which was shortlisted for the Costa Prize, and a collection of short stories, The Not Dead and the Saved.[13]
Clanchy has written and adapted for BBC Radio since 2001 with 12 plays and serials produced, notably Hester, A Little Princess,[14] which starred Adjoa Andoh and Enduring Love. In 2015 her broadcast anthology of her pupils' work, We Are Writing a Poem About Home,[15] was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award.[16] In 2018 she was awarded a Cholmondeley Award.[17]
Teaching Career
Clanchy qualified as a teacher in 1989 and has taught since in several different institutions. Her memoir of her teaching experience,Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2020.[18]
From 2009-2019 she combined employment as a teacher and a role as Writer in Residence at Oxford Spires Academy, a multicultural comprehensive school. Noted students included Mukahang Limbu,[19] Shukria Rezaei,[20] and Amineh Abou Kerech.[21] In 2018 she edited an anthology of poems written by her students, England, Poems from a School, which was widely reviewed.[22][23] Over the lockdown period of 2020 Clanchy met on Zoom with her students and published their poems on Twitter where they became popular.[24][25] In 2021 she published a self-help guide to writing poetry, How to Grow Your Own Poem.
Controversy
In 2020 the academic Sandeep Parmar criticised 'England, Poems from a School' as being likely to 'beguile' readers into believing in 'the benevolence of whiteness' and criticised her physical depiction of foreign students in Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me as "exploitative and reductive".[26] In 2021 Clanchy posted on Twitter accusing a Goodreads reviewer of Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me of having "made up a racist quote and said it was in my book".[27] When two of the quotations were shown to be verbatim, Clanchy said they had been taken out of context[28].[29] Clanchy's response and her book were criticised by other authors, including Chimene Suleyman, Monisha Rajesh and Sunny Singh, who were targeted racist abuse on social media as a result.[30][29][31] An open letter signed by over 950 people from the publishing industry condemned the targeted harassment.[32] Clanchy's publishers, Picador, an imprint of Macmillan Publishing, issued three statements of apology in August 2021 and stated that the books would be rewritten.[29][27] Further statements of apology were made following an interview [33]with Philip Gwyn Jones, Publisher of Picador, in the Daily Telegraph in December 2021.[34] (original statements removed 2023)
Clanchy was defended in articles by Sonia Sodha, who stated that 'the strand of anti-racist thinking that is obsessed with the blame and shame all white people should bear for structural discrimination is (so) corrosive to common cause and understanding' [35] and by Clive Davis,[36] Tomiwa Owolade,[37] Shukria Rezaei,[38] Carmen Callil[39] Amanda Craig and Philip Pullman. A group of her former students wrote that they had experienced no safeguarding issues and were 'disempowered and distressed' by the critics' allegations.[40]
In December 2021 Clanchy published an article in Prospect magazine on the personal impact of public cancellation.[41] Consequently, Picador her publisher announced they would no longer publish her books.[31] In an interview for UnHerd,[42] Clanchy said that her publishers had apologised for her without her consent. She subsequently wrote an article on sensitivity readers.[43] which continued to be discussed in the following years.[44][45][46][47] Clanchy responded to Parmar's original criticisms in an essay[48] in 2022. Clanchy is now published by Swift Press.[49]
Honours
Clanchy was appointed a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2010[50][dead link] and resigned her fellowship in 2023.[citation needed]
Clanchy was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2018 Birthday Honours.[51]
