All that is worth remembering in life, is the poetry of it. Fear is poetry, hope is poetry, love is poetry, hatred is poetry; contempt, jealousy, remorse, admiration, wonder, pity, despair or madness are all poetry.
William Hazlitt – Lectures on the English Poets

My work explores and interprets worlds of intensity, desire and complication lying within and beyond the physical. Particular areas of interest are landscape, the body, and life writing. I write prose as well as poetry, and I often collaborate with visual artists, composers and musicians.

I have been a bookbinder, a bookseller and an editor. I hold a MA (Distinction) in Creative Writing from the University of Sussex (2002). In 2020 I was awarded a MA (Distinction) in Opera Making by Guildhall School of Music & Drama, where I then held a year’s Fellowship, 2020-2021.

I am the author of: Treasure Ground  (HappenStance 2009); Excisions (Waterloo 2011) which was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize 2012; Breastless (Pighog 2011); Cell (Frogmore Press 2015); Springlines (Little Toller Books 2017). My prose memoir The Missing List, described by Andrew O’Hagan as ‘a tapestry of time – brightly coloured, beautifully orchestrated, emotionally pure’ was a finalist in the Mslexia Memoir Competition 2014/15 and was published by Linen Press in September 2018. My second full poetry collection, Each Other, was published by Waterloo Press in autumn 2019. A limited edition hand-stitched pamphlet, End of Season, came out with Coast to Coast to Coast in 2021, and a bilingual (English/Italian) edition of these poems was published by Frogmore Press as End of Season | Fine di stagione in 2022. My latest publication is my third full collection of poems – Beyond the Gate (Worple Press 2023).

Poems have appeared in The Rialto, Envoi, Canadian Woman Studies/Les Cahiers de la Femme, BigCityLit, Poetry News, Ink Sweat & Tears, Agenda, Magma, Black Nore Review, 14 Magazine, The Friday Poem, Finished Creatures, The London Magazine, Allegro, The Warwick Review. Prose has appeared in Agenda, Artemis, The BMJ Medical Humanities Blog. My work has been included in anthologies from Bloodaxe, Bloomsbury, Emma Press, HappenStance, and Five Leaves Press amongst others.

I have facilitated creative writing in various academic and community settings. I led ‘Tools for Writing’ workshops for life prisoners at HMP Shepton Mallet (Outside In project, 2004), I was writer in residence at Woodlands Organic Farm from 2006 to 2008 and at the University of Brighton in 2015. I co-designed and taught on the Autobiography and Life Writing / Creative Non-Fiction Programme at the Writers Place in Brighton before moving to Suffolk in 2018. I have been an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing for the Open University since 2006, and I am a tutor for the Arvon Foundation.

Agent: Isobel Dixon at Blake Friedmann

Biogs and official photos of Clare may be found here.

Links to Clare’s work online

Planet Poetry – podcast/audio interview with Peter Kenny, April 2023

Opening the Gate – HappenStance Press blog with link to an audio conversation with Helena Nelson about some of the poems in Beyond the Gate

The Poetry Bath – podcast/audio interview with Sian Thomas, October/November 2023: Part 1 is here, and Part 2 is here

Interview with Lily Dunn about writing The Missing List

The Friday Poem – essays on collaboration, 2022:
Collaboration and Transformation I
Collaboration and Transformation II

Breastless – Encounters with risk-reducing surgery – multimedia project 2017

BMJ Medical Humanities blog – essays and reviews:
August 2020 – Numbness and Angels
October 2017 – Breastless: reflecting on creativity in the face of surgery
July 2016 – ‘I am book’
February 2016 – Take me with you: the museum of friendship, remembrance and loss
October 2014 – Parkinson’s disease and being human through a lens
May 2014 – Reflections from the 5th International Symposium on Poetry and Medicine
April 2014 – On Cutting and Editing and Scars and Memories, part 1
April 2014 – On Scars and Memories, part 2