Books

The Not-Dead and the Saved

Kate Clanchy

‘Literary hand grenades, raising difficult questions about the world in which we live’ – Guardian

In the sixteen stories of The Not-Dead and The Saved, Kate Clanchy turns her clear gaze and remarkable honesty on what it means to be a mother or a child; to struggle alone; to seek comfort in love; to be present; to be sane.

Lithe prose and crackling wit carry us from comedy to tragedy and back again, and create a bold cast of characters that includes even a few delightfully famous names.

The much-lauded title story won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2009, and the collection as a whole more than delivers on that promise. It celebrates Kate Clanchy’s gift for clarity, empathy and surprise, and confirms her as one of the finest writers of our time.

Paperback

ISBN: 9781800751842

Published: February 29, 2024

Ebook

ISBN: 9781800751835

Published: June 2, 2022

Category:
Fiction

Reviews for The Not-Dead and the Saved

Winner of the BBC National Short Story Award and the V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize

‘Moving swiftly between the comic and the tragic, Clanchy has an eager eye for each and every detail in between’ – Guardian

‘Here are female relationships in all their envy, jealousy, anger, ambition and fear … mitigated by wit and energy’ – Amanda Craig, Independent

‘Subtle, sensitive, keenly observed’ – Independent on Sunday

‘Images pop off the page like firecrackers’ – Sunday Express

Author

Kate Clanchy

Kate Clanchy is a writer, teacher and journalist. Her poetry collection Slattern won a Forward Prize. Her short story ‘The Not-Dead and the Saved’ won both the 2009 BBC National Short Story Award and the VS Pritchett Memorial Prize. Her novel Meeting the English was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award. Her BBC 3 radio programme about her work with students was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes prize. In 2018 she was awarded an MBE for services to literature, and an anthology of her students’ work, England: Poems from a School, was published to great acclaim. In 2019 she published Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, a book about her experience of teaching in state schools for several decades, which won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing; and in 2020 published How to Grow Your Own Poem, which Hollie McNish described as ‘the best book I’ve read about how to practise writing poetry’.