Polly Clark was born in Toronto in 1968 and brought up in Lancashire, Cumbria and the Borders of Scotland. She has pursued a number of careers including zookeeping at Edinburgh Zoo, teaching English in Hungary and ELT publishing at Oxford University Press. In 1997 she received an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry and her first collection, Kiss (Bloodaxe, 2000), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her second, Take Me With You (Bloodaxe, 2005) was a PBS Choice and was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize 2006. A collection of her short stories was recently published in the anthology Ellipsis 2 (Comma Press, 2006).

From 2000 to 2004 Polly was Poet in Residence for the Southern Daily Echo in Southampton, a unique collaboration between a newspaper and a writer which was short-listed in the Arts and Business awards 2002. Polly’s interest in international literature has led her to organise translation exchanges between the UK and other countries, and in 2004 she co-ordinated and chaired Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ford’s tour of provincial theatres in south east England. In 2006 Polly Clark received a Scottish Arts Council Writer’s Bursary. She lives on the west coast of Scotland.