Clare Pollard was born in Bolton in 1978 and currently lives in East London. Her first collection of poetry, The Heavy-Petting Zoo (Bloodaxe, 1998) was written whilst she was still at school, and received an Eric Gregory Award. It was followed by Bedtime (Bloodaxe, 2002) and Look, Clare! Look! (Bloodaxe, 2005), which was made a set text on the WJEC A-level syllabus. A CD of Clare reading her work is available from The Poetry Archive. Her fourth collection Changeling, was published in June 2011, and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She has toured widely with the British Council, including a residency in Beijing. Her first play The Weather (Faber, 2004) premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, and has since been performed at the Munchner Kammerspiele in Munich. In 2003 she won a Society of Authors travel award and an Arts Council writer’s award. The Independent named her one of their Top Writers Under 30.
Clare supports herself by working as a journalist, editor and teacher. She was Assistant Director of the Clerkenwell Literary Festival from 2002-5. She has been Managing Editor of The Idler, and had articles published in The Guardian, The Independent, The TES, London Magazine and Critical Quarterly. As well as appearances on The Verb, Woman’s Hour, Poetry Please and Newsnight Review, she has written and presented two documentaries for television and one for radio, ‘My Male Muse’ (2007), which was a Radio 4 Pick of the Year. Clare was a Royal Literary Fellow at Essex University, and teaches for Arvon, The Poetry School and The City Lit. She is on the editorial board of Magma poetry magazine, and has co-edited an anthology for Bloodaxe with James Byrne, entitled Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21stsCentury.
Publicity photos, credit: Richard Henson:
Clare,greetings from Dublin. Your poem the thirtieth has been on our fridge door since it was in the paper. Love it, many thanks for lifting my spirit ! Looking forward to reading more.
Hello Clare
I hope you don’t mind this mode of contact. I’ve not been able to find a more direct way of contacting you. You can always delete this post if you feel it inappropriate.
You may already have come across our new on-line poetry magazine, Antiphon (www.antiphon.org.uk) co-edited by myself and RosemaryBadcoe.
It is not our primary aim to publish well-established poets, such as yourself, but rather to provide an opportunity for the best upcoming poets, especially in the UK, who are having difficulty finding outlets and are yet to establish themselves. We would be grateful if you could spread the word about the magazine to your fellow poets and in particular to any students you teach whom you feel may be interested. Issue One is online, so people can get a feel for what we are publishing, and we are now calling for submissions for Issue Two.
However, in order to provide the right context for such poets, we want to publish the occasional piece by established poets (no more than three or four per issue) so that the newer poets can feel they are rubbing shoulders with the poets they aspire to be.
So we’d like to invite you to submit. We cannot absolutely guarantee publication, of course, as we put all submissions through an identical editorial process, as you would expect, but we hope youwill be able to offer us something that will help us deliver a quality publication.
Thanks
Noel Williams
antiphon.org.uk
PS You might like to know that I reviewed “Changeling” for the next issue of The North (out in December) and there should be a review in Orbis #158, too (I’m the new Orbis Reviews Editor).
Thanks Noel – Antiphon sounds really interesting. Will have a look and send you an email…C x