Friend: Poems by Young People

(Paperback)

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Here are poems about love, loss, mothers, fathers, God, rain and growing up. About all the things that poems are always about, in fact, with one crucial difference. Instead of being remembered from an adult distance, these poems were written by a diverse group of teenagers direct from their own experience. So as well as being clever, funny and moving, they are also immediate - they go straight to the heart like a text from a friend.

Most of these poems are by pupils from a single multicultural comprehensive school, Oxford Spires Academy. Many have already been social media sensations: Linnet Drury's poems, for instance, have been retweeted over 100,000 times.

Reviews

Praise for England: Poems from a School:

'Not just good for school children, but great by any standard' - Phillip Pullman

'These young poets are writing their lives with heartbreaking immediacy' - Imtiaz Dharker

'I doubt I will read anything as moving for a very long time' - Evie Wyld

'Exceptional. All unflinching truths and zero pretentiousness' - Nathan Filer

'Helping us to see the world with a startling freshness, these lovely poems fill me with hope' - Sarah Howe

Author Bio

Kate Clanchy is a writer, teacher and journalist. Her writing has won many prizes, including a Forward Prize, the BBC National Short Story Award and the Orwell Book Prize for Political Writing. A previous anthology of her students work, England: Poems from a School, was published to great acclaim in 2018. She tweets as @KateClanchy1