Böcker av Kate Clanchy

I text you how much?it hurts not to see you. Here are poems about love, loss, mothers, fathers, God, rain and growing up. About all the things that poems are always about, in fact, with one crucial difference. Instead of being remembered from an adult distance, these poems were written by a diverse group of teenagers direct from their own experience. So as well as being clever, funny and moving, they are also immediate - they go straight to the heart like a text from a friend. Most of these poems are by pupils from a single multicultural comprehensive school, Oxford Spires Academy. Many have already been social media sensations: some students' poems, for instance, have been retweeted over 100,000 times. A donation from the sale of this book will be made to the charity Asylum Welcome.

Do you want to write a poem? This book will show you 'how to grow your own poem'... Kate Clanchy has been teaching people to write poetry for more than twenty years. Some were old, some were young; some were fluent English speakers, some were not. None of them were confident to start with, but a surprising number went to win prizes and every one finished up with a poem they were proud of, a poem that only they could have written - their own poem. Kate's big secret is a simple one: to share other poems. She believes poetry is like singing or dancing and the best way to learn is to follow someone else. In this book, Kate shares the poems she has found provoke the richest responses, the exercises that help to shape those responses into new poems, and the advice that most often helps new writers build their own writing practice. If you have never written a poem before, this book will get you started. If you have written poems before, this book will help you to write more fluently and confidently, more as yourself. This book not like other creative writing books. It doesn't ask you to set out on your own, but to join in. Your invitation is inside.

With a new afterword. 'The best book on teachers and children and writing that I've ever read. No-one has said better so much of what so badly needs saying' - Philip PullmanKate Clanchy wants to change the world and thinks school is an excellent place to do it. She invites you to meet some of the kids she has taught in her thirty-year career. Join her as she explains everything about sex to a classroom of thirteen-year-olds. As she works in the school 'Inclusion Unit', trying to improve the fortunes of kids excluded from regular lessons because of their terrifying power to end learning in an instant. Or as she nurtures her multicultural poetry group, full of migrants and refugees, watches them find their voice and produce work of heartbreaking brilliance. While Clanchy doesn't deny stinging humiliations or hide painful accidents, she celebrates this most creative, passionate and practically useful of jobs. Teaching today is all too often demeaned, diminished and drastically under-resourced. Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me will show you why it shouldn't be. Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2020