Kate Clanchy

'The best book on teachers and children and writing that I've ever read. No-one has said better so much of what so badly needs saying.' Philip Pullman Kate Clanchy wants to change the world and thinks school is an excellent place to do it. She invites you to meet some of the kids she has taught in her thirty-year career. Join her as she explains everything about sex to a classroom of thirteen-year-olds. As she works in the school 'Inclusion Unit', trying to improve the fortunes of kids excluded from regular lessons because of their terrifying power to end learning in an instant. Or as she nurtures her multicultural poetry group, full of migrants and refugees, watches them find their voice and produce work of heartbreaking brilliance. While Clanchy doesn't deny stinging humiliations or hide painful accidents, she celebrates this most creative, passionate and practically useful of jobs. Teaching today is all too often demeaned, diminished and drastically under-resourced. Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me will show you why it shouldn't be.

Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me

Antigona and Me

None of us are perfect, in the way we love, age, or view the world. The Not-Dead and the Saved offers us an opportunity for reinvention: of ourselves, those we have lost, and the world in which we live. From a man doomed to spend his life trying to find solutions to cancer; to a new mother haunted by a swaddling, tablet-eating great-aunt; to an intrepid literary agent who travels to the Yorkshire Moors to discover the next big thing, and ends up eating Anne Bronte's rock cakes, we meet a host of characters who are desperately, creatively, and often hilariously trying to evade the underlying truths of their lives.The Not-Dead and the Saved is a cascade, of warm, wise and insightful stories about human nature, frank, funny, and sometimes desolating, but always underpinned by tenderness, and by a faith in enduring bonds of love.

The Not-Dead and the Saved and Other Stories

"In response to a job advertisement, Struan Robertson, orphan, genius, and just seventeen, leaves his dour native town in Scotland, and arrives in London in the freakishly hot summer of 1989. His job, he finds, is to care for playwright and one-time literary star Phillip Prys, dumbfounded and paralyzed by a massive stroke, because, though two teenage children, two wives, and a literary agent all rattle 'round Phillip's large house, they are each too busy with their peculiar obsessions to do it themselves. As the city bakes, Struan finds himself tangled in a midsummer's dream of mistaken identity, giddying property prices, wild swimming, and overwhelming passions. For everyone, it is to be a life-changing summer. Meeting the English is a bright book about dark subjects--a tale about kindness and its limits, told with love. Spiked with witty dialogue and jostling with gleeful, zesty characters, it is a glorious debut novel from an acclaimed writer of poetry, non-fiction, and short stories"--

Meeting the English

Oxford Spires Academy is a small comprehensive school with 30 languages - and one special focus: poetry. In the last five years, its students have won every prize going. They have been celebrated in The Guardian ('The Very Quiet Foreign Girls Poetry Group'), and the subject of a Radio 3 documentary.In this unique anthology, their mentor and teacher prize-winning poet Kate Clanchy brings their poems together, and allowing readers to see why their work has caused such a stir. By turns raw and direct, funny and powerful, lyrical and heartbreaking, they document the pain of migration and the exhilaration of building a new land, an England of a thousand voices. This poetry is easy to read and hard to forget, as fresh, bright and present as the young migrants who produced it.

Poems from a School

England

Frank Cottrell-Boyce

Courttia Newland

Jacob Ross

Kit de Waal

David Constantine

Alexei Sayle

Juliet Jacques

Holly Pester

Maggie Gee

Stuart Evers

Martyn Bedford

Joanna Quinn

Laura Hird

Matthew Holness

Michelle Green

Sandra Alland

Andy Hedgecock

Francesca Rhydderch

Whatever happened to British protest? For a nation that brought the world Chartism, the Suffragettes, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and so many other grassroots social movements, Britain rarely celebrates its long, great tradition of people power. In this timely and evocative collection, twenty authors have assembled to re-imagine key moments of British protest, from the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 to the anti-Iraq War demo of 2003. Written in close consultation with historians, sociologists and eyewitnesses - who also contribute afterwords - these stories follow fictional characters caught up in real-life struggles, offering a streetlevel perspective on the noble art of resistance. In the age of fake news and post-truth politics this book fights fiction with (well researched, historically accurate) fiction.

Stories of Resistance

Protest

None of us are perfect, in the way we love, age, or view the world. The Not-Dead and the Saved offers us an opportunity for reinvention: of ourselves, those we have lost, and the world in which we live. From a man doomed to spend his life trying to find solutions to cancer; to a new mother haunted by a swaddling, tablet-eating great-aunt; to an intrepid literary agent who travels to the Yorkshire Moors to discover the next big thing, and ends up eating Anne Bronte's rock cakes, we meet a host of characters who are desperately, creatively, and often hilariously trying to evade the underlying truths of their lives. The Not-Dead and the Saved is a cascade, of warm, wise and insightful stories about human nature, frank, funny, and sometimes desolating, but always underpinned by tenderness, and by a faith in enduring bonds of love.

Presents a collection of poems that focus on such topics as love, colonial history, and home.

Samarkand

Newborn

Selected Poems

Mark Haddon

Sarah Perry

Andrew Michael Hurley

Max Porter

Kamila Shamsie

Jeanette Winterson

Ocho destacados escritores contemporáneos reinterpretan las clásicas historias de fantasmas en esta inquietante colección de relatos ambientados en las localizaciones más misteriosas de las islas británicas. Inglaterra es por excelencia la tierra de las apariciones y los lugares encantados. Para este libro, ocho prominentes novelistas británicos tuvieron la oportunidad de elegir un edificio perteneciente al English Heritage ;una institución pública que protege y promueve el patrimonio histórico inglés; y permanecer en él después del horario de visita habitual. Inmersos en la historia, la atmósfera y las leyendas sobre esos emplazamientos, canalizaron la parte más oscura de su fantasía para crear las extraordinarias historias de fantasmas contemporáneas recogidas en este volumen. La mansión jacobea de Audley, el fuerte romano de Housesteads, los castillos de Dover, Kenilworth, Pendennis y Carlisle, el palacio de Eltham y un búnker de la Guerra Fría situado en York. Entre los muros de estos famosos lugares encantados, cada autor encontró la inspiración necesaria para reinterpretar a su manera las clásicas ghost stories, que llevan aterrorizando desde hace generaciones a cuantos lectores se acercan a ellas.

Ocho fantasmas ingleses

Quitter l'Ecosse pour la très chic Londres et assister Philip Prys, "géant de la littérature" cloué dans un fauteuil roulant suite à un AVC ? Le jeune et naïf Strudan en rêvait. Mais entre la cupide ex-femme de l'écrivain, sa fille obèse et son étrange épouse, alors que le monde se métamorphose et les masques tombent, cet été caniculaire de 1989 lui réserve bien des surprises... Satire sociale féroce mais pleine de tendresse, personnages de comédie shakespearienne, humour à la David Lodge et dialogues ciselés : un premier roman jubilatoire.

Crème anglaise

A collection of poems from Kate Clanchy, covering such subjects as relationships between men and women, married men, self-sufficient men and wounded men. Other poems are about memory and time, set in school classrooms and muddy sports fields, and haunting, tender love poems.

Slattern

Do you want to write a poem? This book will show you ‘how to grow your own poem’ . . . Kate Clanchy has been teaching people to write poetry for more than twenty years. Some were old, some were young; some were fluent English speakers, some were not. None of them were confident to start with, but a surprising number went to win prizes and every one finished up with a poem they were proud of, a poem that only they could have written – their own poem. Kate’s big secret is a simple one: is to share other poems. She believes poetry is like singing or dancing and the best way to learn is to follow someone else. In this book, Kate shares the poems she has found provoke the richest responses, the exercises that help to shape those responses into new poems, and the advice that most often helps new writers build their own writing practice. If you have never written a poem before, this book will get you started. If you have written poems before, this book will help you to write more fluently and confidently, more as yourself. This book not like other creative writing books. It doesn’t ask you to set out on your own, but to join in. Your invitation is inside.

How to Grow Your Own Poem

Do you want to write a poem? This book will show you 'how to grow your own poem'... Kate Clanchy has been teaching people to write poetry for more than twenty years. Some were old, some were young; some were fluent English speakers, some were not. None of them were confident to start with, but a surprising number went to win prizes and every one finished up with a poem they were proud of, a poem that only they could have written - their own poem. Kate's big secret is a simple one: to share other poems. She believes poetry is like singing or dancing and the best way to learn is to follow someone else. In this book, Kate shares the poems she has found provoke the richest responses, the exercises that help to shape those responses into new poems, and the advice that most often helps new writers build their own writing practice. If you have never written a poem before, this book will get you started. If you have written poems before, this book will help you to write more fluently and confidently, more as yourself. This book not like other creative writing books. It doesn't ask you to set out on your own, but to join in. Your invitation is inside.

Previous ed.: published as All the poems you need to say hello. 2004.

The Picador Book of Birth Poems

'Literary hand grenades, raising difficult questions about the world in which we live' - Guardian In the sixteen stories of The Not-Dead and The Saved, Kate Clanchy turns her clear gaze and remarkable honesty on what it means to be a mother or a child; to struggle alone; to seek comfort in love; to be present; to be sane. Lithe prose and crackling wit carry us from comedy to tragedy and back again, and create a bold cast of characters that includes even a few delightfully famous names. The much-lauded title story won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2009, and the collection as a whole more than delivers on that promise. It celebrates Kate Clanchy's gift for clarity, empathy and surprise, and confirms her as one of the finest writers of our time.

The Not-Dead and the Saved

Antigona and Me is a memoir of the five years the poet Kate Clanchy spent living closely with Antigona, a Kosovan refugee. Antigona becomes her project, her protegee, her cleaner, her nanny, and slowly, through hours of conversation and negotiations of difference, her friend. Through the story of the women's growing understanding is woven the dramatic tale of Antigona's great escape - from Milosevic, from her forced, violent marriage, and from the most traditional pastoral society in Europe - and the growing toll of her losses, as she and her rebellious teenage daughters negotiate London. Antigona's wit and vertiginous perspectives on contemporary life illuminate and transform the way the writer thinks, bringing many hard truths uncomfortably close to home.

‘An absolutely wonderful book’ - Deborah Moggach One morning in London, two neighbours start to chat over the heads of their children. Kate Clanchy is a writer, privileged and sheltered. Antigona is a refugee from Kosovo. On instinct, Kate offers Antigona a job as a nanny, and Antigona accepts. Over the next five years and a thousand cups of coffee Antigona’s extraordinary story slowly emerges. She has escaped from a war, she has divorced a violent husband, but can she escape the harsh code she was brought up with, the Kanun of Lek? At the kitchen table where anything can be said, the women discover they have everything, as well as nothing, in common.

There is no way more appropriate to mark a new arrival than with poetry -- and in this profoundly celebratory book, poet and columnist Kate Clanchy has made an inspired choice of poems that speak powerfully of the wonder, joy, bewilderment and mystery that new life brings. Charting the whole process from conception through to pregnancy and birth, All The Poems You Need to Say Hello is perfect for expectant parents -- and an ideal gift for new parents. Poems from across the centuries by men and women -- from Sharon Olds, Sylvia Plath and Helen Dunmore to Seamus Heaney, Hugo Williams and William Blake -- chart the whole experience, mirroring the ups and downs and moments of despair and joy.

Kate Clanchy

About

Books

Join the club