Maeve Clarke
Novelist, Children's writer
About
Maeve Clarke is an award-winning writer from Birmingham. Her novel, Trapped Between Two Worlds won the SI Leeds Literary prize and the SI Readers’ Choice award, 2024, and was longlisted for the Mslexia Children’s & YA Novel competition and Bath Children’s Novel award. Maeve was the writer for the opening ceremony of the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games, a challenging yet exciting experience.
Her first novel, What Goes Round (Tindal Street Press, 2003), explored the themes of cultural identity and belonging. Maeve won the Creative Future Writers’ Platinum award for fiction with ‘Sewing Flowers’ (2016). She has been published in various anthologies: the award-winning Whispers in the Walls: New Black and Asian Voices from Birmingham (Tindal Street Press, 2001), Women & Work: Monologues (Women & Theatre, 2020) and in Forward Birmingham Stories (Birmingham Literature Festival, 2024).
Maeve’s writing for theatre includes The Jackanooni which was shortlisted for the Sky Arts RSL writers award for playwriting (2022) and longlisted for the Bruntwood prize for Playwriting, Papatango New Writing prize and Theatre 503.
Her educational writing includes readers and adaptations of contemporary novels for students of English as a Second Language. Her adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s Boys Don’t Cry (Penguin Random House, 2022) won the Language Learner Literature award in 2023.
Before she started writing, Maeve taught English as a Foreign Language in Spain and Italy. She has also taught in China but now teaches academic English at a local university. She is working on her third novel, which is inspired by Jamaican folklore and the supernatural.