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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 recent awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship; the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism; the Slightly Foxed Prize for Best First Biography; 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 RED COMET: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath; THE GRIEF OF INFLUENCE: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes; and THE ULSTER RENAISSANCE: Poetry in Belfast 1962-1972. Her debut novel is THE SCRAPBOOK.

Her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Harvard Review, Time, Air Mail, Lit Hub and The Times Literary Supplement. She lives outside of New York City.

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. As Anna travels back and forth to Germany to deepen her relationship with the elusive Christoph, her perspective is powerfully interrupted by chapters that follow both of their grandfathers during the war. 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.