Kate Clanchy

Kate Clanchy is a British poet, teacher, and memoirist. She is a celebrated poetry educator based in Oxford, where she has spent many years teaching creative writing to refugee and immigrant children at a comprehensive school. Her teaching work became the subject of Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me (2019), a memoir about the extraordinary students she has worked with and the power of poetry to give voice to experience. Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2020 and the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award. It celebrates the resourcefulness, intelligence, and imaginative range of refugee children and offers an implicit critique of an education system that often fails them. The book attracted later controversy in 2021 over some of its descriptions of students, which led to a revised edition. As a poet, Clanchy is the author of several acclaimed collections including Slattern (1995), Samarkand (1999), and Newborn (2004). She has received the Forward Prize, a Somerset Maugham Award, and other major poetry honours. She lives in Oxford.