Clare Pollard was born in Bolton in 1978 and currently lives in South London with her husband and two children. She is a Doctor of Letters, having received an honorary doctorate for her services to literature from Bolton University.
Her first collection of poetry, The Heavy-Petting Zoo (1998) was written whilst she was still at school, and received an Eric Gregory Award. It was followed by Bedtime (2002) and Look, Clare! Look! (2005), which was made a set text on the WJEC A-level syllabus. Her fourth collection Changeling (2011) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and her latest is Incarnation (Bloodaxe, 2017). Her pamphlet The Lives of the Female Poets is published by Bad Betty Press (2019). Her poem ‘Pollen’ has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Individual Poem for 2022.
Clare’s first play The Weather (Faber, 2004) premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, and has since been performed at the Munchner Kammerspiele in Munich. In 2012 she co-wrote the radio play Surface to Air with WN Herbert for BBC Radio 4. She has toured widely with the British Council, including a residency in Beijing, and been involved in numerous translation projects, including co-translating The Sea-Migrations by Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf (Bloodaxe, 2017) which received a PEN Translates award and was chosen as the Sunday Times poetry book of the year. Clare has also translated Ovid’s Heroines (Bloodaxe, 2013), which she toured as a one-woman show with Jaybird Live Literature, and Trust by Anna T. Szabo (Arc, 2021).
Clare has supported herself by working as an editor, journalist and teacher. She was editor of Modern Poetry in Translation – co-founded by Ted Hughes – for five years, and is poetry editor for The Idler. Clare has also co-edited an anthology for Bloodaxe with James Byrne, entitled Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21stsCentury, edited two issues of Magma poetry magazine and co-edited an issue of The Butcher’s Dog. She has recently been a judge for the PBS Next Generation list, Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize, Manchester International Poetry Prize, the Northern Writer’s Awards, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award. Her articles and reviews have been published in The Guardian, The Independent, The TES, Critical Quarterly, Poetry London, Poetry Review, London Magazine, Lithub and The Dark Horse. As well as appearances on The Verb, Woman’s Hour, Poetry Please and Newsnight Review, she has written and presented two documentaries for television and two for radio, ‘My Male Muse’ (2007), which was a Radio 4 Pick o
f the Year, and ‘Unlocking Anne’ about Anne Locke (BBC Radio 3, 2023). She is also currently Artistic Director of Winchester Poetry Festival.
In 2019 Clare wrote an adult non-fiction title for Fig Tree, Fierce Bad Rabbits: The Tales Behind Children’s Picture Books. She was awarded a Society of Authors work-in-progress grant for her next book, a novel about prophecy entitled Delphi, which has been published by Fig Tree in the UK and Avid Reader in the US in 2022, and is forthcoming in German, Dutch and Spanish.
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