Kate Clanchy is a writer, teacher, and editor. She has been a qualified and practising teacher since she was 22. Her writing includes three prize-winning collections of poetry, the Costa First Novel Prize-shortlisted Meeting the English, and the Orwell Prize-winning memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me.
Last summer, her work came under sustained criticism for its purportedly insensitive depictions of her students. Picador, her publisher until last week, did not come to her defence.
Instead, it was left to Clanchy’s students, whose poems were collected by her in England Poem from A School, to support her. In September, at least 20 of them wrote an open letter to The Bookseller, describing Clanchy’s “unequivocal care and support for us… as poets and as people”. They said they wanted to push back against suggestions that they “may be victims in some capacity”.
Yesterday, she came to the UnHerd studio to discuss her experiences — of teaching, writing, and cancel culture — for the first time.
She explained how the campaign against her began when people accused her of “exocitising and commodifiying” her immigrants students after she published an anthology of their poems. From there, Clanchy felt a campaign building against her. Following the publication of her memoir — for which she won the Orwell Prize — she was accused of being “racist and ablest”, even though she was trying to celebrate her student’s differing cultures:
On the effect of being forbidden to celebrate these differences:
How her pupils felt:
On the cancellation feeding frenzy:
Did she inflame the blowback?
On the publisher’s ‘apology’:
On the murky future of memoir writing:
On her expectations about the reception to this interview:
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