The Writers of Wales Database

CLARE, HORATIO

You can contact Horatio through his publishers, John Murray on: 02078 735000
Website: http://www.horatioclare.co.uk

Horatio was born in London in 1973 and raised on a farm in the Black Mountains. He was educated at Atlantic College and later studied English Literature at York University. He has crewed on Welsh Lifeboats and trained as a journalist on local papers. Between 1998–2005 he worked as a researcher at the BBC’s Radio Arts Department, for programmes such as ’Nightwaves’, ’Front Row’ and The ’Verb’.

A writer and radio producer, he has contributed to various newspapers, magazines and travel anthologies, and continues to write and produce freelance. In 2006, he published Running for the Hills (Hodder John Murray, 2006), a memoir of his childhood on a remote Welsh hill farm, shadowed by the break–up of his parents’ marriage. This title was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award 2006 and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. Horatio has since also published Truant (John Murray, 2007), which resumes his journey through adolescence.

In 2009 he published a travelogue entitled A Single Swallow (Chatto & Windus, 2009). Based on a recent trip following the swallow migration route, it was part-funded by a Somerset Maugham Award and was on the 2010 Wales Book of the Year Long List. 

Horatio currently divides his time between South Wales, London and Lancashire. He is a Member of Academi.

Reviews:
With respect to Running for the Hills (John Murray, 2006)

"…A joy…heartening, raw, tender…”
John Carey, Sunday Times

"…It should be required reading…”
Guardian

"…So beautifully written that you almost have to hold your breath…"
Daily Mail


Selected Publications:
Running for the Hills (John Murray, 2006)
Truant (John Murray, 2007)
A Single Swallow (Chatto and Windus, 2009)
The Prince's Pen (Seren, 2011)

Contributed to:
Red City: Marakech Through Writers’ Eyes (contributor) (Eland, 2005)
Meetings With Remarkable Muslims (contributor) (Eland, 2005)
Sicily Through Writer’s Eyes (editor) (Eland, 2006)




Truant (John Murray, 2007)

At thirteen Horatio Clare was a boarder at a boy`s public school, a privileged member of an apparently blessed generation. A rebel – one of those who detested the system, who thought it not just fun but right to break its laws – he was expelled for smoking dope. He became one of the thousands who gleefully ignored the warnings and set out, in search of experience and intensity, to slalom on the slippery slope.

He was a truant in its original sense: one who beggars himself through choice, not necessity. From university campuses to the rooftops of New York; from Brixton basements to fear and loathing in Mid Devon, through psychosis, mania and depression, from sanity to madness and back again, this is a portrait drawn from a generation that turned to drugs. And it is a search for understanding: why do we do these things, and what do they do to us? What were we looking for and what did we find?

To purchase this title from amazon.co.uk, please click on its front cover

A Single Swallow (Chatto and Windus, 2009)

A journey of 6,000 miles across two continents and fourteen countries is nothing to swallows: they do it twice a year. But for a writer and birdwatcher, this is the expedition of a lifetime. By trains, cars, buses, motorbikes, trucks, canoes, planes, one camel and three ships, Horatio Clare followed migrating swallows (Hirundo rustica) from reed beds outside Bloemspanein, where millions roost in February, to a barn in Wales, where a pair nest in May.

From the slums of Cape Town to the palaces of Algiers, through Pygmy villages where pineapples grow wild, to the Gulf of Guinea where the sea blazes with oil flares, A Single Swallow is a journey through the modern world to the tune of an ancient rhythm. It is a story of old empires and modern tribes, of the horrors of power and the wonders of kindness. It includes a witch-doctor’s recipe for stewed swallow, explains how to travel without money or a passport, describes a terrifying incident involving three Spanish soldiers and a tiny orange dog, betrays several swallow secrets and proves that Wales exists only because of Ryan Giggs. It also tests the wisdom of an ancient piece of hearsay: the Zulus say that those who follow the swallows never come back . . .

Magical, inspiring, beautifully written with passion and purpose, A Single Swallow is a thrilling book about the intersection of the natural and the human worlds, sending shivers down the spine and lifting the heart.

To purchase this title from amazon.co.uk, please click on its front cover