Kate Clanchy’s “moving and powerful” memoir about working as a teacher in the state education system, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, has won the Orwell prize for political writing.
Clanchy, a writer and poet who has been a teacher for 30 years in London, Scotland, Essex and Oxford, beat shortlisted titles including Robert Macfarlane’s Underland and Amelia Gentleman’s The Windrush Betrayal to the £3,000 book award.
Judges chaired by Stephanie Flanders of Bloomberg Economics said Clanchy’s book showed a “brilliantly honest writer” taking on “a subject that ties so many people up in knots – education and how it is inexorably dominated by class”.
“Yet this book is the very opposite of a worthy lecture,” the judges said. “Clanchy’s reflections on teaching and the stories of her students are moving, funny, full of love and offer sparkling insights into modern British society.”
Clanchy, in her acceptance speech, said that “schoolteachers are not taken seriously in so many different ways: not by politicians, not as intellectuals, and not as artists”.
“So for this to win the prize for ‘political writing as art’ means so much to me, and I hope it will mean something for other teachers, because if there’s one thing the pandemic has taught us, it’s that teachers are very important and very necessary, and that schools are communities, and without them we rip big holes in our societies,” she said. “This is the prize, of all prizes, I would have wanted.”
In Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, Clanchy writes of how teachers have a lower social standing than other professionals, not just because they are paid less, and not “just because of the messy, practical nature of teachers’ work, either”.
“It’s because of gender and class prejudice, because, in short, most teachers are Miss,” she writes. “Miss: I have heard so many professional people express distaste for that name, but never a working teacher. It grated on me, as a middle-class Scot, 30 years ago. No longer: Miss is the name I put on like a coat when I go into school; Miss is the shoes I stand in when I call out the kids in the corridor for running or shouting; Miss is my cloak of protection when I ask a weeping child what is wrong; Miss is the name I give another teacher in my classroom, in the way co-parents refer to each other as ‘Mum’ or ‘Dad’. Miss seems to me a beautiful name.”
The Orwell prize for political fiction was also announced on Thursday evening, with the US author Colson Whitehead taking the £3,000 award for his novel The Nickel Boys. Set in a segregated reform school, the novel tells the story of a young African American boy, Elwood Curtis, whose life is changed forever when he is sent to Nickel Academy in Florida. It beat shortlisted novels including Booker winner Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo, and Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann.
Judges called it “an expertly crafted historical novel … as convincing in its character portrayal as it is unsparing in its depiction of corruption and racial brutality”.
“All the while it provides unimpeachable evidence that human dignity and love can provide a beacon for transforming lives that’s ultimately more powerful and enduring than violence,” they added.
Whitehead, speaking from New York after learning of his win, said he had not been sure if the book, which is based on a real school, would travel. But he said he has discovered that The Nickel Boys has resonances across the world, with abuses of power happening “anywhere where the powerful can inflict their will upon the powerless, where there’s a culture of impunity”.
He also reminded people to keep safe and wear a mask. “Mask it or casket, as we say in the Whitehead household.”
In the Orwell prizes for journalism, also announced on Thursday, Times columnist Janice Turner won for reports on human trafficking, the decline of support for the UK Labour party on the “red wall”, and a feature on clearing her childhood home in Doncaster. The “Exposing Britain’s social evils” category was won by freelance journalist Ian Birrell, for his reporting on the treatment of children and teenagers with autism and mental health conditions in both the NHS and the Italian healthcare system.
