In decades to come, when PhDs are written about the cancel culture bubble of the early 2020s, the case of Kate Clanchy will stand as the ideal example. A perfect storm of Twitter, Covid, burgeoning civil rights movements such as Black Lives Matter, and a publishing industry having kittens about its own reputation managed to take a critically acclaimed, Orwell Prize-winning book and destroy its author – a beloved poet and teacher – in a matter of weeks. The tragedy is, Katie Razzall’s strong six-part podcast, Anatomy of a Cancellation (Radio 4/BBC Sounds), gives us the sort of sober, nuanced conversation that was not allowed to happen at the time.
Clanchy’s memoir, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, detailing her decades teaching poetry to, often, working-class, disadvantaged and immigrant children was published in 2019 and spent two years racking up praise and very healthy sales. However, online rumblings in the summer of 2021 about the book’s use of language, particularly when describing the physical attributes of Clanchy’s pupils, exploded into a storm. Clanchy was accused of racism, ableism and more. By early 2022, she and publisher Pan MacMillan, who caved into the baying mob and threw them Clanchy in the hope it would appease them, parted company by “mutual consent”.
Razzall, the BBC’s culture and media editor, resists taking sides or offering easy answers, but instead opts for a “Rashomon effect” style of reportage. Each episode gives us the story from a different perspective – Clanchy, her detractors, the publishing industry, her students, sensitivity readers – and each one contradicts the other. The rights and wrongs? Who did what? What actually happened? Well, it depends who you ask.
