Clare Best’s work explores and interprets worlds of intensity, desire and complication lying within and beyond the physical. Particular areas of interest are landscape, the body, and life writing. Clare writes prose as well as poetry, and often collaborates with visual artists, composers and musicians. Her first full collection of poetry, Excisions, was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize 2012. Other poetry publications include Treasure Ground, Breastless, CELL, Springlines, Each Other >and End of Season / Fine di stagione. Her most recent collection is Beyond the Gate (Worple Press, 2023). Clare’s prose memoir The Missing List was a finalist in the Mslexia Memoir Competition 2015 and was published by Linen Press in September 2018. This work has been cited by Dr Irene Gammel of Ryerson University, Toronto as ‘an important, essential text in the context of the #MeToomovement’. Clare has been a fine bookbinder, a bookseller and an editor and she currently teaches Creative Writing for the Open University. She has held writing residencies in a range of settings including HMP Shepton Mallet, Woodlands Organic Farm on the Lincolnshire Fens and the University of Brighton. In 2020 she was awarded a MA (Distinction) in Opera Making at Guildhall School of Music & Drama and was a Fellow there in 2020-2021; during this time she worked on three chamber operas and several other vocal projects.

Twitter: @clarebest1

Author photo by Freddie Willatt