Heather Clark

Heather Clark is the author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (Knopf/Jonathan Cape), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the LA Times Book Prize. Red Comet was a New York Times Top Ten Book of 2021, and won the Slightly Foxed Prize for Best First Biography. It was a “Book of the Year” in The Guardian, The Times, and elsewhere. Clark’s other books are The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (Oxford UP) and The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962-1972 (Oxford UP), which both won awards. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, and the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library. Clark holds degrees from Oxford, Trinity College Dublin, and Harvard, and is Professor of Contemporary Poetry and Director of the Centre for International Contemporary Poetry at the University of Huddersfield. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Harvard Review, Times Literary Supplement, Lit Hub, Time, PN Review and elsewhere. She lives outside New York City with her husband and two children.