England
Kate Clanchy
Ages 6-82018 Nominee
Books are My Bag Poetry Award
Synopsis
'Not just good for school children, but great by any standard' - Phillip Pullman
Oxford Spires Academy is a small comprehensive school with 30 languages – and one special focus: poetry. In the last five years, its students have won every prize going. They have been celebrated in the Guardian ('The Very Quiet Foreign Girls Poetry Group’), and the subject of a BBC Radio 3 documentary.
In this unique anthology, their mentor and teacher prize-winning poet Kate Clanchy brings their poems together, and allowing readers to see why their work has caused such a stir. By turns raw and direct, funny and powerful, lyrical and heartbreaking, they document the pain of migration and the exhilaration of building a new land, an England of a thousand voices. In England: Poems from a School, you will find poetry is easy to read and hard to forget, as fresh, bright and present as the young migrants who produced it.
Not just good for school children, but great by any standard
Phillip Pullman
Although this book is called England Poems from a School, these are really poems from the world, speaking of a freshly imagined England, in an English that plays the music of other half-remembered languages. These young poets are writing their lives with heartbreaking immediacy, in a time when home is a leaving, and also a becoming.
Imtiaz Dharker
Exceptional. All unflinching truths and zero pretentiousness.
Nathan Filer
