'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.
AUTHOR: Kate Clanchy was born and grew up in Scotland. She is a writer in several genres, and has won the BBC National Short Story Award for her fiction, a Forward Prize and the Saltire Prize for her poetry, and the Writers' Guild Award for her much acclaimed memoir Antigona and Me. She was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for We Are Writing a Poem About Home, a radio poem by the students of Oxford Spires Academy where she has been Writer in Residence since 2009.
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