Clare, Horatio 1973-

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Clare, Horatio 1973-

PERSONAL:

Born 1973, in London, England. Education: Attended Atlantic College and York University.

ADDRESSES:

Home—London, England; Breconshire, South Wales. Agent—Tina Bennett, Janklow & Nesbit, 445 Park Ave., New York, NY 10022; Tif Loehnis, Janklow & Nesbit UK, 33 Drayson Mews, Kensington, London, England.

CAREER:

Journalist, radio producer, writer. British Broadcasting Corportaion (BBC) Radio Art Department, researcher and producer for Front Row Nightwaves, and The Verb, 1998-2005.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Guardian First Book Award long list, 2006, and Young Writer of the Year Award nominee, Sunday Times, 2007, for Running for the Hills: A Memoir; Somerset Maugham Award, 2007; Glen Dimplex/Irish Writers Centre New Writing Prize short list.

WRITINGS:

Running for the Hills: Growing Up on My Mother's Sheep Farm in Wales, Scribner (New York, NY), 2006, published as Running for the Hills: A Memoir, John Murray (London, England), 2006.

Sicily through Writers' Eyes, Eland Books (London, England), 2006.

Truant: Tales from the Road of Excess, John Murray (London, England), 2006.

Contributor to books, including Red City: Marrakech through Writers' Eyes, Sicklemoon Books, 2004; and Meetings with Remarkable Muslims, Eland Books (London, England), 2005. Contributor of articles and essays to periodicals, including the Spectator, New Statesman, Guardian, Financial Times, Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, and Vogue.

SIDELIGHTS:

A former radio producer at BBC Radio in London, Horatio Clare plumbed his experiences growing up on a remote farm in Wales in his 2006 memoir, Running for the Hills: Growing Up on My Mother's Sheep Farm in Wales. Clare is the son of London journalists who, in the late 1960s fell in love with and bought the farm, hoping to live out a rural idyll life. However, the harsh life of sheep farming proved divisive to the parents. Separated and then divorced, the father returned to his London career, and young Clare, along with his brother, stayed on the farm with their mother, trying to make a go of it. Finally, however, after several years, they were forced to sell and move on. Speaking with Bookseller contributor Benedicte Page, Clare explained part of the inspiration for writing this memoir: "I wanted to write a biography of my parents' divorce for my own reasons. If you think about the time just before you were born, how your parents were then—that was a sort of golden summer, a myth for me. I wanted to find out how true that was and what had happened to it."

Reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic responded positively to this debut work. A contributor for the London Times termed Running for the Hills a "beautifully observed memoir," while Page found it a "deeply personal story related in graceful and sensitive prose." A reviewer for the Economist felt the book was "lifted by its sense of joy and spiritual freedom," and was furthermore "a forgiving tribute to parents who paid a price for following their hearts." Similar praise greeted the American publication of the memoir. A Kirkus Reviews critic commended the "remarkably evenhanded portraits of [Clare's] parents [that] present their flaws and foibles with generosity and sensitivity." And a Publishers Weekly contributor concluded: "Beauti- fully written, with enormous affection, this is a memoir of an unusual childhood, but also a careful analysis of a ‘perfectly, heroically mismatched’ marriage."

Clare told CA: "I have wanted to write for as long as I can remember. We grew up without television (there was a mountain in the way of the signal), so books were a central part of my childhood. The thrill of storytelling and a love of language were implanted in my brother and me at an early age. Our father loved reading to us and our mother filled the long motorway drive from London to South Wales with retellings of Shakespeare's plays, and dramatic stories from British history. I have been influenced by a great range of writers, from Percy Bysshe Shelley to Alastair Maclean, Samuel Taylor Coleridge to James Baldwin, Dylan Thomas, and Kurt Vonnegut. I read indiscriminately across different forms, genres, and nationalities. When I sit down to do it I know very clearly what the job is—to pursue truth, through clarity and honesty. While still quite young my brother and I were given a volume of George Orwell's essays by my father. ‘If you want to write well,’ he said, ‘write like this.’ I tend to do it late at night, with cigarettes (which I am hoping to quit) and coffee (which I am not). Though my books are sold as memoirs they are more like biographies of the (too few) lives and times I have so far seen. I have a feeling that fiction—the techniques of ficition—may be the best way to chase truth. Fiction seems to come closer to clarity than nonfiction, which leads into the clouds of fact. The most surprising thing I have learned through writing is that I am much more honest, in many ways a better person, on paper than I am in life."