Polly Clark

POEMS

Polly Clark was born in Toronto and brought up in Lancashire, Cumbria and the Borders of Scotland, and now lives in Helensburgh, which is the setting for her 2017 fictionalised account of the years WH Auden spent in the town.

Polly has worked variously as a zookeeper, a teacher of English in Hungary and in publishing at Oxford University Press; she is now Literature Programme Producer for Cove Park, Scotland’s centre for artists’ residencies.

In 1997 she won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry. Her first collection, Kiss (Bloodaxe Books 2000), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; her second, Take Me With You (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. Farewell My Lovely was published by Bloodaxe in 2009. Her pamphlet, A Handbook For the Afterlife, published by Templar in 2015, remains her most recent publication of poetry.

Since then, Polly Clark has turned her literary hand to novels, while keeping with her poetic interest through the fictionalized character of Auden for her debut, Larchfield (Quercus, 2017), followed by Tiger (Quercus, 2019) researched while tiger-trekking through Siberia, and for which she travelled the UK in a tiger dress in promotion of.