Polly Clark


Polly Clark is a Canadian-born British writer and poet. Her first novel, Larchfield, about the author W. H. Auden, was published in 2017.

Background

Clark was born in Toronto and came to the UK as a child, growing up in Cumbria, Lancashire and the Scottish border area. She now lives in Scotland and produces the Literature Programme at Cove Park, Scotland's International Artist Residency Centre, near Helensburgh. She has had a varied career, including a period as a teacher of English in Hungary and as a zookeeper. She was Poet in Residence for the Southern Daily Echo.
Her first novel, Larchfield, was published in March 2017 and is based on the short period spent by W. H. Auden as a teacher at the Larchfield Academy in Helensburgh, Scotland. Larchfield won the 2015 Mslexia Women's Novel Competition. David Robinson in The National and Books from Scotland calls it "layered, clever, captivating". John Boyne 'Magical and transcendent... I suspect that few debuts in 2017 will match the elegance of Larchfield. This is a beautiful novel: passionate, lyrical and surprising. I will remember Larchfield for a long time.'. Stuart Kelly in The Scotsman remained immune to its charms, however, saying "it is not a work for which I would recommend a reader parting with money".
In 2017, Clark contributed to a BBC2 documentary on Auden's life and wrote a piece for the Guardian on childbirth.

Works

Poetry