Polly Clark
Polly Clark is the author of three novels and four collections of poetry.
She won an Eric Gregory Award for her first poetry collection, Kiss (Bloodaxe, 2000) and her second Take Me With You (Bloodaxe, 2005) was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. Her short collection A Handbook for the Afterlife (Templar, 2015) was shortlisted in the Michael Marks Awards.
Her first novel, Larchfield (Quercus, 2017) fictionalised a little-known but vital time in the life of poet WH Auden and won the Mslexia Prize as a manuscript. The book and its author were featured in the BBC biopic of WH Auden, Stop All The Clocks, alongside Paul Muldoon, Alexander McCall Smith, Richard Curtis and others. Larchfield received praise from Richard Ford, Margaret Atwood and many others.
Tiger (Quercus, 2019) was shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish Book of the year and was described by the Guardian as joining a ‘vanguard of novels – including Laline Paull’s The Bees, Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy and Richard Powers’s tree epic The Overstory – which approach non-human life in diverting new ways.’ Full review here. Rights have been sold in France, Germany, Italy, Bulgaria and Spain.
Polly Clark’s third novel Ocean is published in hardback by Eye/Lightening in Spring 2025. Translation rights have been sold in Germany and Italy.
In 2024 Clark serialised Ocean in podcast form on her Substack, Wild Ink. The substack showcases new work by Polly and her subscribers and offers a supportive space for writers to develop their craft.
Polly Clark was born in Toronto, brought up in Scotland and now lives in London.
Instagram: @MsPollyClark
Twitter: @MsPollyClark
Wild Ink: pollyclark.substack.com
Polly Clark is represented at Jenny Brown Associates by Jenny. For all enquiries contact jenny@jennybrownassociates.com
Books by Polly
Tiger
Riverrun, May 2019
A mesmerising literary novel set between the UK and Siberia about mothers, daughters and the wild side of female nature. Set across two continents, Tiger is a sweeping story of survival and redeeming love that plunges the reader into one of the world’s last wildernesses with blistering authenticity.
Frieda is a primatologist, sensitive and solitary until a violent attack shatters her ordered world. In her new role as a zookeeper, she confronts a very different ward: an injured wild tiger. Deep in the Siberian taiga, Tomas, a Russian conservationist, fears that the natural order has toppled. The king tiger has been killed by poachers and a spectacular tigress now patrols his vast territory as her own. In a winter of treacherous competition, the path of the tigress and her cub crosses with an Udeghe huntress and her daughter. Vengeance must follow, and the fates of both tigers and people are transformed. Learning of her tiger’s past offers Frieda the chance of freedom. Faced with the savage forces of nature, she must trust to her instinct and, like the tiger, find a way to live in the world.
Larchfield
Quercus, March 2017
It’s early summer when a young poet, Dora Fielding, moves to Helensburgh on the west coast of Scotland and her hopes are first challenged. Newly married, pregnant, she’s excited by the prospect of a life that combines family and creativity. She thinks she knows what being a person, a wife, a mother, means. She is soon shown that she is wrong. As the battle begins for her very sense of self, Dora comes to find the realities of small town life suffocating, and, eventually, terrifying; until she finds a way to escape reality altogether.
Another poet, she discovers, lived in Helensburgh once. Wystan H. Auden, brilliant and awkward at 24, with his first book of poetry published, should be embarking on success and society in London. Instead, in 1930, fleeing a broken engagement, he takes a teaching post at Larchfield School for boys where he is mocked for his Englishness and suspected – rightly – of homosexuality. Yet in this repressed limbo Wystan will fall in love for the first time, even as he fights his deepest fears.
The need for human connection compels these two vulnerable outsiders to find each other and make a reality of their own that will save them both. Echoing the depths of Possession, the elegance of The Stranger’s Child and the ingenuity of Longbourn, Larchfield is a beautiful and haunting novel about heroism – the unusual bravery that allows unusual people to go on living; to transcend banality and suffering with the power of their imagination.
Praise for Larchfield
Winner of the MsLexia Prize
Larchfield is that rarest of rare first novels – a book that actually achieves its great ambition. I found it so immensely readable; it’s brainy, verbally acute and knowing, with an ingenious literary historical premise that it impressively (and artfully) carries off right in front of your eyes. It’s work of considerable talent. –Richard Ford
This is a mysterious, wondrous, captivating book. –Louis de Bernieres
A passionate, lyrical, surprising debut. –John Boyne, Irish Times
A funny, poised, affecting meditation on the healing power of poetry…an affecting debut novel. –The Times
Larchfield is that rare first novel that utterly achieves its great ambition. I found it so immensely readable; it’s brainy, verbally acute and knowing, with an ingenious literary historical premise that it impressively (and artfully) carries off right in front of your eyes. It’s work of considerable talent. –Richard Ford