KATE CLANCHY – #NoDebate

How literary ‘do-gooder’ Kate Clanchy lit the fuse on the ugliest cancellation in recent history

Anthony Brett – 11 August 2021 – The Telegraph

It’s said that “every day is a school-day”, but for teacher, poet and former Twitter darling Kate Clanchy, the last few have been more homework-heavy than most. 

The veteran secondary-school English teacher has built a formidable online brand promoting the poetry of her young students – often accompanied by captions highlighting their difficult backstories – and critiquing Government education policy. 

But now she’s on the verge of cancellation, after internet reviews accused her of peddling racist and ableist clichés in her 2019 memoir, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me (which Philip Pullman once labelled “the best book on teachers and children and writing I’ve ever read”)…

Pullman lambasts Society of Authors as ‘vehicle for gesture politics’ after Clanchy row

David Sanderson – Monday September 26 2022 – The Times

Philip Pullman has accused the Society of Authors of being a “vehicle for gesture politics” after resigning as president earlier this year over a cancel culture row.

Pullman quit after being criticised over his comments supporting Kate Clanchy, the writer whose book was cancelled by her publisher.

Clanchy had been accused of using stereotypical or derogatory descriptions of children in classes she taught in her memoir, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, which won the Orwell Prize for political writing in 2020.

Her publisher, Picador, withdrew its backing for the book, which has since been reissued in a revised form by Swift Press.

Clanchy said that Joanne Harris, her fellow author and the chairwoman of the society’s management committee, told her to apologise for the memoir. Clanchy did apologise for any offence caused…

Kate Clanchy ‘parts company’ with publisher after discrimination row

Lucy Knight – Thu 20 Jan 2022 – The Guardian

Kate Clanchy and her publisher Pan Macmillan will no longer be working together, and distribution of all of her titles is to cease, following widespread criticism last summer of her book Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me.

Readers took to Goodreads and Twitter to point out racial tropes and ableist descriptions in the Orwell prize-winning book about Clanchy’s experience as a teacher. For example, one child was described as being “so small and square and Afghan with his big nose and premature moustache” while two autistic students were said to be “jarring company”.

As a result of the complaints, Clanchy issued an apology in August and announced that her publisher had given her the opportunity to rewrite parts of the book.

However, in a joint statement by Clanchy and Pan Macmillan published in the Bookseller on Thursday, it was revealed that plans for the revised version, which had been due to come out in autumn 2021, have now been scrapped….

War of words between authors Joanne Harris and Kate Clanchy is investigated

David Anderson – Monday September 26 2022 – The Times

The author at the heart of a row enveloping the writers’ trade union has employed private investigators after accusing the group’s chairwoman of describing her as “ignorant, cruel and patronising”.
Kate Clanchy, the Oxford poet and teacher, employed the investigators to compile a forensic report of social media activity involving several people, including Joanne Harris, the English-French author best known for her novel Chocolat and the present chairwoman of the Society of Authors’ management committee.
In a letter to members and staff of the society, which has been seen by The Times, Clanchy said she had become, as “Harris had suggested [she should] . . .”, a scapegoat for the entire publishing industry in “sackcloth and ashes”.

The hounding of author Kate Clanchy has been a witch-hunt without mercy

Publishers and other institutions are turning cowardly and brittle when faced with social media frenzies

Sonya Sodha – Sun 23 Jan 2022 – The Guardian

A few years ago, when I was still getting to grips with the vagaries of Twitter, I inadvertently took part in a social media pile-on. Someone well known said something stupid and I enjoyed tweeting to that effect. But when she shared how upsetting she found the onslaught, I was forced to confront my unwitting bit-part in a collective act of bullying. There was nothing wrong with my tweet by itself, but hundreds of people shouting at you feels like abuse in a way that a single critique does not and the virtual nature of social media makes it harder to know when you are complicit in a form of mob justice.

Things have got worse since then and I find myself returning to this idea of proportionality often, most recently in the case of the author Kate Clanchy. Last week, it was announced that she and her publisher, Pan Macmillan, had parted company “by mutual consent” and that it will “revert the rights” and cease distribution of all her work…

Impact, not intent

AUG 9, 2021 – BY PRAGYA AGARWAL

We all make mistakes, and we all carry stereotypes and biases. But instead of putting up fences when this is brought to our attention, we can use them as learning moments.

If you are on Twitter, you couldn’t have missed it. Kate Clanchy’s memoir, that won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, is rife with racialised descriptions of her students. Words such as chocolate and almond used to describe skin colour, tired tropes of hair or size of bosoms used to stereotype different ethnicities, the shape of skull and other facial features such as nose used to define them. It was shocking once these snapshots of whole pages from her book were being shared. There has been a sense of disillusionment with how such language passed through the numerous rounds of copyediting, how a publisher could allow such words to get through in the public domain, and how a panel for UK’s most esteemed political prize could have missed the way autistic and minority ethnic children have been viewed and represented in this book. It is not the first time this was pointed out – Sandeep Parmar wrote about it in 2020 – but this is the first time it came to a wider attention, mainly because Clanchy insisted at first that these were all lies and that her phrases were taken out of context….

From morality clauses to sensitivity readers: inside UK publishing’s identity crisis

Is the books world in urgent need of change – or simply running scared of Twitter?

ALEX CLARK – 16 July 2022 – The New Statesman

On 5 July Picador, which is part of the Pan Macmillan conglomerate, announced that its publishing director, Philip Gwyn Jones, was stepping down “by mutual agreement” after two years in the role. Gwyn Jones, a respected publisher with long experience, had been criticised for his handling of a row over Kate Clanchy’s memoir, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. In 2021 concerns were raised by readers on Goodreads.com about the book’s descriptions of pupils of colour, as well as of working-class and autistic children. Gwyn Jones had first defended Clanchy, their former teacher, and then distanced himself from the author, tweeting: “I must use my privileged position as a white middle-class gatekeeper with more awareness to promote diversity, equity, inclusivity”. Clanchy and Picador parted ways in January.
The changing of the guard at Picador was just the latest chapter in British publishing’s increasingly furious fight with itself. There is a tacit assumption, naturally attractive to those who work in and around it, that the book business is inherently progressive, championing free speech and inclusivity. But in recent months many of its core tenets have been tested. Is publishing undergoing an identity crisis? Should it defend its authors at all costs, or realign itself with the values of the digital age?
At the Hay Festival in May, the children’s author Anthony Horowitz said that he was “absolutely shocked” by the rewrites Walker Books had asked him to do on his most recent work, Where Seagulls Dare. “Children’s book publishers are more scared than anybody,” he said, describing “a culture of fear” born of polarised politics and a terror of social media outrage. The same month, the Twitter account @YoungRefuseniks – an “online support group for trans and non-binary publishing employees/hopefuls and authors” – was forced to close after lists the group had compiled (of people in UK publishing that they deemed sympathetic and unsympathetic) were leaked…