Clare Pollard · Lyrikline.org

photo © Marcos Avlonitis

* 22.10.1978, Bolton, United Kingdom
lives in: London, United Kingdom

Clare Pollard is an award-winning poet and playwright. She was born in Bolton in 1978, studied English Literature at Cambridge University, and is based in London today.

At age 19 Pollard published her first poetry collection, The Heavy-Petting Zoo (Bloodaxe Books, 1998) written whilst she was still at school. In 2000, Pollard received a Eric Gregory Award for this collection. It was followed by Bedtime in 2002, and Look, Clare! Look! In 2005. In 2004, her play The Weather was performed at the Royal Court Theatre, published by Faber in 2004, and has since been performed also at the Münchner Kammerspiele in Munich.
Her radio documentary My Male Muse (2007), was a BBC Radio 4 Pick of the Year.
In 2009 Pollard edited together with James Byrne the Bloodaxe young poets showcase titled Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century. Her fourth collection Changeling (2011) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Clare Pollard works as a journalist, editor, translator, and teaches regularly for the Arvon Foundation, the Poetry School and the City Literary Institute. In 2013, she was the judge for the inaugural international Hippocrates Prize for Young Poets, and in 2015 for The Poetry Society’s Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize.

Her translation Ovid's Heroines (Bloodaxe, 2013) is a series of poems in the voices of women from Greek and Roman myth – including Phaedra, Medea, Penelope and Ariadne – addressed to the men they love. Clare Pollard has also co-translated a selection poems by the UK-based Somali poet Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf, titled The Sea-Migrations, which won an English PEN Award. In 2017, Bloodaxe Books published her fifth poetry collection Incarnation.
In 2017 she took over the editorship of the Modern Poetry in Translation magazine.
Her non-fiction book Fierce Bad Rabbits: The Tales Behind Children‘s Picture Books was published by Fig Tree in 2019.

Clare lives in south London with her husband and her two small children, and blogs regularly about her life as a poet at www.clarepollard.com.

Clare Pollard
Author

Poems

Clare Pollard
Author