Our Cat Henry Comes to the Swings

A deceptively simple and poetic picture book about a cat who leads the neighbourhood dogs on a merry chase to the park and back. Henry, a rather superior sort of cat, defies and confounds all the dogs and remains supremely unruffled by his chaotic encounters with them.

Clanchy, Kate

Bird, Jemima

Children's Books

Oxford Univ. Pr.

What Is She Doing Here? is a memoir of the five years the poet Kate Clanchy spent living closely with Antigona, a Kosovan refugee. Antigona becomes her project, her protégée, her cleaner, her nanny, and slowly, through hours of conversation and negotiations of difference, her friend.
Through the story of the women`s growing understanding is woven the dramatic tale of Antigona`s great escape - from Milosevic, from her forced, violent marriage, and from the most traditional pastoral society in Europe - and the growing toll of her losses, as she and her rebellious teenage daughters negotiate London. Antigona`s wit and vertiginous perspectives on contemporary life illuminate and transform the way the writer thinks, bringing many hard truths uncomfortably close to home.
`Kate Clanchy has written not just a heart-stopping story, but one that is essential for our times.` Anne Enright

What is She Doing Here?

Biographies & Memoirs

Memoirs

MACMILLAN PUB. LTD.

‘Antigona,’ I said. ‘How would you feel if I wrote your life down in a book?’
‘Good,’ she said at once. ‘Good. And then a feature film, actually. Mini-series.’
One morning in London, two neighbours start to chat over the heads of their children. Kate Clanchy is a writer, privileged and sheltered, Antigona is a refugee from Kosovo. On instinct, Kate offers Antigona a job as a nanny, and Antigona, equally shrewdly, accepts. Over the next five years and a thousand cups of coffee Antigona’s extraordinary story slowly emerges. She has escaped from a war, she has divorced a violent husband, but can she escape the harsh code she was brought up with, the Kanun of Lek? At the kitchen table where anything can be said, the women discover they have everything, as well as nothing, in common.
‘Clanchy’s portrait of Antigona is wonderfully vivid, as are her reflections on her own complex feelings. A powerfully written, refreshingly honest work.’ Observer

Antigona and Me

Community & Culture

Palgrave MacMillan Ltd

Slattern

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

RANDOM HOUSE UK

"Exceptional . . . Clanchy has a wincingly accurate eye for social comedy, a vivid descriptive sense, and profound understanding of her characters. This is a delectable read." --Daily Mail (UK) In response to an advertisement, Struan Robertson, orphan, genius, and just seventeen, leaves his dour native town in Scotland, and arrives at a creaky mansion in London in the freakishly hot summer of 1989. His job, he finds, is to care for playwright and one-time literary star Phillip Prys, dumbfounded and paralyzed by a massive stroke, because, though Phillip's two teenage children, two wives, and a literary agent all rattle 'round his large house, they are each too busy with their peculiar obsessions to do it themselves. As the city bakes, Struan finds himself tangled in a midsummer's dream of mistaken identity, giddying property prices, wild swimming, and overwhelming passions. For everyone, it is to be a life-changing summer. Kate Clanchy's Meeting the English is a bright book about dark subjects--a tale about kindness and its limits, told with love. It is a coming of age story for anyone who has ever felt themselves to be an outsider; a love story for the awkward; and a comedy for anyone who has ever lived in a family. Written by an acclaimed writer of poetry, non-fiction, and short stories, this glorious debut novel is spiked with witty dialogue and jostling with gleeful, zesty characters.

Meeting the English: A Novel

Genre Fiction

Thomas Dunne Books

Kate Clanchy's 'Selected Poems' gathers together poetry from her three prize-winning collections, 'Slattern', 'Samarkand', and 'Newborn'.

Selected Poems

Poetry

Pan/Macmillan

Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2020.'The best book on teachers and children and writing that I've ever read. No-one has said better so much of what so badly needs saying' - Philip PullmanKate Clanchy wants to change the world and thinks school is an excellent place to do it. She invites you to meet some of the kids she has taught in her thirty-year career.Join her as she explains everything about sex to a classroom of thirteen-year-olds. As she works in the school Inclusion Unit, trying to improve the fortunes of kids excluded from regular lessons because of their terrifying power to end learning in an instant. Or as she nurtures her multicultural poetry group, full of migrants and refugees, watches them find their voice and produce work of heartbreaking brilliance.While Clanchy doesnt deny stinging humiliations or hide painful accidents, she celebrates this most creative, passionate and practically useful of jobs. Teaching today is all too often demeaned, diminished and drastically under-resourced. Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me will show you why it shouldnt be.

Some Kids I Taught & What They Taught Me

Picador

'Not just good for school children, but great by any standard' - Phillip Pullman Oxford Spires Academy is a small comprehensive school with 30 languages - and one special focus: poetry. In the last five years, its students have won every prize going. They have been celebrated in the Guardian ('The Very Quiet Foreign Girls Poetry Group'), and the subject of a BBC Radio 3 documentary. In this unique anthology, their mentor and teacher prize-winning poet Kate Clanchy brings their poems together, and allowing readers to see why their work has caused such a stir. By turns raw and direct, funny and powerful, lyrical and heartbreaking, they document the pain of migration and the exhilaration of building a new land, an England of a thousand voices. In England: Poems from a School , you will find poetry is easy to read and hard to forget, as fresh, bright and present as the young migrants who produced it.

England

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Do you want to write a poem? This book will show you ‘how to grow your own poem’ . . .\nKate Clanchy has been teaching people to write poetry for more than twenty years. Some were old, some were young; some were fluent English speakers, some were not. None of them were confident to start with, but a surprising number went to win prizes and every one finished up with a poem they were proud of, a poem that only they could have written – their own poem.\nKate’s big secret is a simple one: is to share other poems. She believes poetry is like singing or dancing and the best way to learn is to follow someone else. In this book, Kate shares the poems she has found provoke the richest responses, the exercises that help to shape those responses into new poems, and the advice that most often helps new writers build their own writing practice.\nIf you have never written a poem before, this book will get you started. If you have written poems before, this book will help you to write more fluently and confidently, more as yourself. This book not like other creative writing books. It doesn’t ask you to set out on your own, but to join in. Your invitation is inside.

How to Grow Your Own Poem

Science & Math

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Clanchy, Kate. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Clanchy, Kate

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Clanchy, Kate. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Our Cat Henry Comes to the Swings

Our Cat Henry Comes to the Swings

What is She Doing Here?

Antigona and Me

Slattern

Meeting the English: A Novel

Selected Poems

Some Kids I Taught & What They Taught Me

England

How to Grow Your Own Poem