Jack Clemo was born in 1916 near St Austell, Cornwall. Son of a clay-kiln worker, he received only a village school education, but devoted himself entirely to writing throughout a restless adolescence. He remained a mystical recluse during his twenties, living in poverty with his widowed mother. By 1955 he had become deaf and blind. His first published novel, Wilding Graft, won an Atlantic Award in Literature from Birmingham University in 1948. An allegorical novel, The Shadowed Bed, which he wrote soon afterwards, was eventually published in 1986 by Lion Publishing. He wrote two volumes of autobiography, Confession of a Rebel (1949) and Marriage of a Rebel (1980), both recently reissued in paperback by Hodder, and a record of personal faith, The Invading Gospel (1958), reissued by Lakeland Books in 1972 and by Marshall and Pickering in 1986. His first collection of poems, The Clay Verge, appeared in 1951, and was incorporated in a larger volume, The Map of Clay, ten years later. The Wintry Priesthood, a sequence which won an Arts Council Festival of Britain poetry prize in 1951, was also printed in The Map of Clay. Four other collections of poetry followed: Cactus on Carmel (1967), The Echoing Tip (1971), Broad Autumn (1975) and A Different Drummer (1986). His Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1988) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. This was followed by two further collections from Bloodaxe, Approach to Murano in 1993, and The Cured Arno, published posthumously in 1995. He published two books with Cornish imprints, The Bouncing Hills, humorous dialect stories and light verse (Truran Publications, Redruth, 1983), and Banner Poems, local descriptive pieces (Cornish Nationalist Publications, 1989). Clay Cuts, an illustrated limited edition of early clay-image poems, was published by Previous Parrot Press, Oxford, in 1992. He was awarded a Civil List pension in 1961, and an honorary D.Litt degree from Exeter University in 1981. He married his wife Ruth in 1968, and in 1984 they left Cornwall to settle in her home town of Weymouth in Dorset. Their courtship and marriage was the subject of a biography, Clemo: A Love Story by Sally Magnusson (Lion Publishing, 1986). Jack Clemo died in 1994.
