Authors
Polly Clark Novelist United Kingdom
Polly was born in 1968 in Toronto, Canada and brought up in Lancashire, Cumbria and the Borders of Scotland. She has pursued several careers, including zookeeping at Edinburgh Zoo, teaching English in Hungary, and freelance writing.
Polly Clark's work has been broadcast on BBC Radio3 and 4, and she was one of the poets selected by the BBC to celebrate National Poetry Day in 2001, with a poem specially recorded aboard a fishing boat in the Solent. Between 2000 and 2003 Polly Clark was poet in residence for the Southern Daily Echo in Hampshire. She brought new writing from major writers such as Louis de Bernieres, Wendy Cope, Russell Celyn Jones and Andrew Motion to readers of the paper, and through events and competitions encouraged readers to pursue their own writing. The residency was shortlisted in the Arts and Business Awards 2002. In 2004 Polly toured provincial theatres in the south of England with US Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ford, introducing and chairing discussions of his work. Her interest in the poetry and writers of other countries has led to her organizing translation exchange programs in China and Israel.
She has won the Mslexia International Poetry Competition twice in 2004 and 2005, and has been a prizewinner in the Bridport Competition. In 2004 she was selected as one of Mslexia Magazine's top ten poets to emerge in the last decade. So far she has published two collections of poetry, Kiss (2000) and Take Me With You (2005), and the latter was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2005.
Participation Program
Round Table 3 Newness in my literature
Round Table 2 Newness in my literature
Round Table 1 Newness in my literature