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Heather Clark

Biography

Heather Clark

Heather Clark earned her bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Harvard University and her doctorate in English from Oxford University. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Fellowship, a Leon Levy Biography Fellowship at the City University of New York and a Visiting U.S. Fellowship at the Eccles Centre for American Studies, British Library.

A former Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, she is the author of THE GRIEF OF INFLUENCE: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes and THE ULSTER RENAISSANCE: Poetry in Belfast 1962-1972. Her work has appeared in publications including Harvard Review and The Times Literary Supplement, and she recently served as the scholarly consultant for the BBC documentary Sylvia Plath: Life Inside the Bell Jar. 

She divides her time between Chappaqua, New York and Yorkshire, England, where she is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at the University of Huddersfield.

Heather Clark

Books by Heather Clark

The Scrapbook
by Heather Clark - Fiction, Women's Fiction

Harvard, 1996. Anna is about to graduate when she falls hard for Christoph, a visiting German student. Captivated by his beauty and intelligence, she follows him to Germany, where charming squares and grand facades belie the nation’s recent history and the war’s destruction. Christoph condemns his country’s actions but remains cryptic about the part his own grandfather played. Anna, meanwhile, cannot forget the photos taken by her American GI grandfather at the end of the war, preserved in a scrapbook only she has seen. One witnesses the plight of Holocaust victims in the days after liberation and helps capture Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, while the other fights for Nazi Germany. Their fragmented stories haunt Anna and her lover two generations later --- and may still tear them apart.

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
by Heather Clark - Biography, Nonfiction

With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials, Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant Sylvia Plath, who had precocious poetic ambition and was an accomplished published writer --- even before she became a star at Smith College. Refusing to read Plath’s work as if her every act was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark considers the sociopolitical context as she thoroughly explores Plath’s world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her troubles with an unenlightened mental health industry; her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes; and much more.