Samarkand

Kate Clanchy

Sep 2011 · Pan Macmillan

About this ebook

Few first collections in recent years have made the impact of Kate Clanchy’s award-winning Slattern, which gained her a reputation as a poet of great immediacy and wit. In this new book her range is extended dramatically. Samarkand is both a darker and a more sunlit collection than its predecessor. Inside, the reader will find surreal elegies; love poems of every humour; grim episodes from colonial history and meditations on home and distance as well as some practical advice on having sex with angels – all delivered with the effortless musicality of phrase and formal panache that are fast becoming Clanchy’s trademarks.

About the author

Kate Clanchy is a writer, teacher and journalist. Her poetry collection Slattern won a Forward Prize. Her short story ‘The Not-Dead and the Saved’ won both the 2009 BBC National Short Story Award and the VS Pritchett Memorial Prize. Her novel Meeting the English was shortlisted for the Costa Prize. Her BBC 3 radio programme about her work with students was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes prize. In 2018 she was awarded an MBE for services to literature, and an anthology of her students' work, England: Poems from a School, was published to great acclaim. In 2019 she published Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, a book about her experience of teaching in state schools for several decades.