About

Polly Clark is a poet. She was born in 1968 in Toronto, Canada and brought up in Lancashire, Cumbria and the Borders of Scotland. She has published three collections of poetry with Bloodaxe Books: Kiss (2000) a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Take Me With You (2005), a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and Farewell My Lovely (2009). She has published short stories in Comma Press’s Hyphen and Ellipsis series and has reviewed and written for The Guardian and The Observer. Her poems have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4, most recently on Poetry Please, and have been published in journals and broadsheets including The London Review of Books, Poetry Review and The Independent.

Before winning an Eric Gregory Award in 1997, Polly published poems anonymously and pursued a number of other careers, jobs and income streams including zookeeping at Edinburgh Zoo, writing for Paul Raymond Publications, teaching English in Hungary, credit control at Unipart and Rights Manager at Oxford University Press. She has a degree in English and Philosophy from Liverpool University and an MA in English studies from Oxford Brookes University.

Since 2000, Polly has supported herself by devising and carrying out literature projects with the Arts Council of England and Creative Scotland. Between 2000 and 2004 she was Poet in Residence for the Southern Daily Echo in Southampton, a project which grew and culminated in her editing and producing quarterly creative writing supplements for readers. Well known writers and poets including Andrew Motion, Louis de Bernieres and Carol Ann Duffy came to the region and wrote specially commissioned pieces for the paper, and Polly organised a tour of schools in the region by the then Poet Laureate. This project was shortlisted for a Daily Telegraph/ Arts and Business Award. Polly also developed the online database of writers in the south-east, Pirandello, which still runs; and in 2004 she devised, co-ordinated and presented Pulitzer Prizewinning author Richard Ford’s tour of south-east England, a pioneering project with Arts Council South East which was covered on the Today programme and in national broadsheets.

She has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Edinburgh University and has taught for the Arvon Foundation and in numerous schools and universities. She produces the Literature Programme for Cove Park, Scotland’s International Artist Residency Centre where she programmes a range of writers and events.  With Cove Park and Creative Scotland (previously Scottish Arts Council) she has devised a number of innovative poetry projects, working with poets in the UK and internationally, including Yang Lian, Amir Or, W.N. Herbert, Pascale Petit, Clare Pollard. Projects include Poet to Poet translations exchanges with China and Israel and Freeing the Poet’s Voice, a unique voice coaching project for poets led by Hollywood voice coach Kristin Linklater. She also devised and still leads the Fielding Programme for new writers at Cove Park, which comprises a range of retreats and mentored residencies. She has been a judge for the Eric Gregory Awards and the Scottish Arts Council’s Writers Bursary Award scheme. She is married with a daughter and a bat-eared dog.

You can hear Polly read her work on the Poetry Archive, and read a critical perspective on her work by Sean O’Brien on the British Council’s Contemporary Writers website.