I was born 10 days before Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. During my 38 years on this planet I have been a Scrabble fanatic, a trapeze artist, a lesbian, a bisexual, a maths and philosophy graduate, a cleaner, a revolutionary socialist, a raver, a novelist, a performance poet, a shop steward, a gibbering wreck, a vegetarian women-only workers' co-op member and a meat-eating heterosexual computer programmer.
My mother, grandmother, great-aunt and godmother are all published authors. I assumed that I too would be an author when I grew up. Then I grew up.
At the age of 16 I lost my heterosexual virginity, but I wasn't impressed so I became a lesbian instead. In the same year I sampled my first hallucinogenic drug, and found myself face to face with a horse's hooves on an anti-Thatcher demo at Wapping. It was a good introduction to adulthood.
I and my partner Ally once won a prize (a disco glitter ball, no less) for performance poetry. We also have been known to write and perform our very own genre of music ("techno blues"), and are sometimes available for weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs.
I live in inner city Manchester, in a decrepit house with bits of old ship in the cellar, a dismembered shop dummy in the garden, a
child on the sofa and a
journalist in the bed.
I once went to trapeze lessons for a whole year. I loved being upside down and in the sky, but I wasn't very good at it. I was never really a trapeze artist.
People hardly ever spell my name right. It's Clare, like bare. Stark and unadorned, with no extraneous letters I. And it's Sudbery, like surgery or carvery. Think sharp, think knives.
For even more about me (not bored yet?), there's an in-depth interview
here on the Big Chill website.
