Clare was born in Aotearoa, raised on Whadjuk Noongar Country in Western Australia and has lived in Pōneke since 2005. Her first novel, Unsheltered (Scribner, Simon And Schuster, 2021) was warmly received on both sides of the Tasman. New Zealand reviewers described it as ‘astonishing’, ‘heart-breaking’ and ‘extraordinarily suspenseful’. The Sydney Morning Herald called it ‘an absolute banger of a novel’.
Clare has an MA in Creative Writing from Te Herenga Waka’s International Institute of Modern Letters and her fiction has been published in New Zealand and Australian journals, broadcast on RNZ National, and included in the anthology A Game of Two Halves – the Best of Sport 2005-2019 (Victoria University Press). Her award-winning travel writing has appeared in the NZ Herald and elsewhere. She will use her time at MKWC to work on a new novel-in-progress about where violence goes.