Beyond The Gate

Clare Best's first full poetry collection, Excisions (Waterloo 2011), was a finalist for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize, 2012. Her second, Each Other (Waterloo 2019), was described in London Grip as 'brimming with ideas, thinking, experiments with form, and intrigue'. Other poetry publications include Treasure Ground, Breastless, CELL and End of Season. Clare has held residenciesatWoodlandsOrganicFarminLincolnshire, the University of Brighton and HMP Shepton Mallet. She thrives on collaborating with visual artists and with musicians and composers. Springlines, a project with the painter Mary Anne Aytoun-Ellis, explores hidden and mysterious bodies of water across the South of England. Clare has co-created three chamber operas and a song cycle, and was a Fellow at Guildhall School of Music & Drama in 2021. Her prose memoir The Missing List (Linen Press 2018) - written during the last illness of the father who abused her as a child - was a finalist in the Mslexia Memoir Competition 2015.Andrew O'Hagan wrote of this work, 'a tapestry of time - brightly coloured, beautifully orchestrated, emotionally pure.' The Missing List was cited by Dr Irene Gammel of Ryerson University,Toronto, as 'an important, essential text in the context of the #MeToo movement.' Clare lives near the Suffolk coast. clarebest.co.uk
Clare Best's first full poetry collection, Excisions (Waterloo 2011), was a finalist for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize, 2012. Her second, Each Other (Waterloo 2019), was described in London Grip as 'brimming with ideas, thinking, experiments with form, and intrigue'. Other poetry publications include Treasure Ground, Breastless, CELL and End of Season. Clare has held residenciesatWoodlandsOrganicFarminLincolnshire, the University of Brighton and HMP Shepton Mallet. She thrives on collaborating with visual artists and with musicians and composers. Springlines, a project with the painter Mary Anne Aytoun-Ellis, explores hidden and mysterious bodies of water across the South of England. Clare has co-created three chamber operas and a song cycle, and was a Fellow at Guildhall School of Music & Drama in 2021. Her prose memoir The Missing List (Linen Press 2018) - written during the last illness of the father who abused her as a child - was a finalist in the Mslexia Memoir Competition 2015.Andrew O'Hagan wrote of this work, 'a tapestry of time - brightly coloured, beautifully orchestrated, emotionally pure.' The Missing List was cited by Dr Irene Gammel of Ryerson University,Toronto, as 'an important, essential text in the context of the #MeToo movement.' Clare lives near the Suffolk coast. clarebest.co.uk