Horatio Clare is a Welsh-British author. He worked at the BBC as a producer on Front Row, Night Waves and The Verb. He has written two memoirs, Running for the Hills and Truant: Notes from the Slippery Slope, a novella, The Prince's Pen, and two works of travel and nature writing: A Single Swallow and Down to the Sea in Ships. He wrote and edited Sicily Through Writers' Eyes. In 2015 he published Orison for A Curlew, a combination of travel and nature writing, and an acclaimed children's book, Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot, the sequel to which, Aubrey and the Terrible Ladybirds appeared in 2017. Both Aubrey books were longlisted for the Carnegie Medal. In the winter of 2017 Chatto and Windus published Icebreaker - A Voyage Far North, the record of a journey around the Bay of Bothnia with the Finnish government's Icebreaker Otso early in 2017.
Background and career
Born in London, Clare grew up on a hill farm in the Black Mountains of South Wales. He later attended Malvern College and the United World College of the Atlantic before reading English at the University of York. Clare describes the experiences of his childhood in his first book, the best-seller Running for the Hills. His second book, Truant: Notes from the Slippery Slope was published in 2008. In 2009 Clare's third book, A Single Swallow: Following an epic journey from South Africa to South Wales", was published. In 2014 Chatto and Windus published Down to the Sea in Ships: Of Ageless Oceans and Modern Men, the best-selling story of two voyages on container vessels Clare joined. In 2015 his first children's book, Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot, was published by Firefly, and an account of the disappearance of the slender-billed curlew, Orison for a Curlew was published by Little Toller Books. In 2017 "Aubrey and the Terrible Ladybirds" was published by Firefly. A collection of retellings of Welsh legends, "Myths and Legends of the Brecon Beacons", was published by Graffeg. Clare is the author and editor of Sicily Through Writers' Eyes, an anthology of writings about Sicily, and a contributor to the collections Red City: Marrakech Through Writers' Eyes and Meetings With Remarkable Muslims. His journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Spectator, New Statesman, Financial Times, The Sunday Telegraph, The Daily Telegraph, "The Observer"and Vogue. Formerly Miriam Allot Fellow at the University of Liverpool and a senior lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, Clare now lectures in creative writing at the University of Manchester.
