Heather Clark
“In her poem “Daddy,” Sylvia Plath writes, “Every woman adores a Fascist.” That line has always fascinated me, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the connections Plath was making in “Daddy” regarding totalitarianism, patriarchy, and submission. These are big, philosophical ideas that I tried to explore on a smaller canvas in my novel.”
“A swiftly-moving, molecularly perceptive, singular portrait of intoxicating young love. Clark captures the psychological nuances and emotional currents of two youthful intellects wrestling with the weight of history and questions of legacy, moral responsibility, and the blinders and dissonance of a complicated romance.”
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“Mesmerizing . . . Comprehensive . . . Stuffed with heretofore untold anecdotes that illuminate or extend our understanding of Plath’s life . . . Clark is a felicitous writer and a discerning critic of Plath’s poetry . . . There is no denying the book’s intellectual power and, just as important, its sheer readability.”
“An impressive achievement representing a prizeworthy contribution to literary scholarship and biographical journalism.”
“Revelatory . . . Plath’s struggles with depression and her marriage to Ted Hughes emerge in complex detail, but Clark does not let Plath’s suicide define her artistic achievement, arguing with refreshing rigor for her significance to modern letters. The result is a new understanding and appreciation of an innovative, uncompromising poetic voice.”
“Supported by evidence from many rare and unpublished sources, Clark’s brilliant close reading of both poets changes the course of Plath-Hughes studies. Essential.”
“Heather Clark’s study is a useful piece of work...she covers her ground with clarity, point and economy.”
Heather Clark is a biographer, literary critic, and novelist. She is the author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (Knopf, 2020), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the LA Times Book Prize in Biography. Red Comet was also a “Book of the Year” in The Guardian, The Times (London), The Daily Telegraph, The Boston Globe, Lit Hub, The Times of India, Trouw (Netherlands), and elsewhere, and has been translated into five languages. Her other books include Sylvia Plath: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2024), The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (Oxford University Press, 2011), and The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962–1972 (Oxford University Press, 2011). In June 2025, her debut novel, The Scrapbook, will be published with Pantheon.
Clark’s writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Harvard Review, Time, Air Mail, Lit Hub, Poetry, and The Times Literary Supplement. Her recent awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars fellowship, a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellowship, and a Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellowship at the City University of New York.
Discussing the characters in her forthcoming novel and their discussions of conflict and artistic representation, she noted: “If you choose to write about the Holocaust, the stakes are very high. I’ve always been interested in the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, especially Theodor Adorno’s famous quotation that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” My doctoral dissertation, which became my first book, was about the poetry of the civil war (“The Troubles”) in Northern Ireland. As an English professor, I taught many classes over the years on the poetry of war.
In one of my favorite Seamus Heaney poems, “The Grauballe Man,” Heaney mocks himself for elegizing a murdered person—for aestheticizing the person’s death. He metaphorically weighs the beauty of his poem against “the actual weight / of each hooded victim, / slashed and dumped.” Which holds the greater weight? The actual or the metaphorical? Heaney is aware of the risk he is taking when he writes poems about violence, but should he stay silent instead?”
She holds a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Harvard and a doctorate in English from Oxford, and was formerly Professor of Contemporary Poetry at the University of Huddersfield, UK. She lives outside New York City with her husband and two children.
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