Authors Electric

I have just ordered a copy of Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me . I fear that my open admission of this is enough to render me the target of social media hatred. Until very recently, Kate Clanchy had a solid gold reputation as an extraordinarily gifted English teacher, particularly in the area of creative writing and particularly among young people from a wide variety of ethnic groups and disadvantaged backgrounds. Her pupils flourished under her inspiring tutelage, writing poems of an originality and sophistication way beyond their years, and many have since gone on to successful careers as poets as adults. In this memoir, Clanchy looks back on 30 years of a job she clearly loved and excelled in, writing with such power and conviction that the book won the 2020 Orwell Prize for Political Writing. Then, a couple of weeks ago, things went wrong. Badly wrong. A scathing review of the book on Goodreads attracted other negative attacks. Clanchy was accused of using racist stere...

I don’t usually talk about work in progress. The ideas that make stories are such delicate gifts, potentially so fleeting. They must be nurtured in secret and over time. I don’t usually talk about relationships either, not the ones that matter. So how stupid have I been, I wonder, to publish insights from my mother’s recent life – and mine – when our stories are still a work in progress and what is true today may be fool's gold by tomorrow? Relationships change as people change -- well, we all know that -- but there's something about a close relationship with someone who is living with dementia that feels quite frighteningly unstable. You discover how the faculty of memory ballasts the most everyday interactions. You both know, you assume , that the reason you’re both rather achy and therefore grumpy is that you’ve just returned from walking too long in the sun. But, if the fact of the walk has vanished from one mind, only the grumpiness remains and that can be disconce...