An award-winning author has finally received an apology four years after she was cancelled in a book racism row.
Kate Clanchy had found success with the release of Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me.
It tells the story of her three decades of teaching in British state schools and won the illustrious Orwell Prize for political writing in 2020.
But a year later the writer found herself at the centre of a bitter online storm as she was accused of using racist descriptions of children.
The book was slated online by academics and writers alike as they believed she focused too much on students’ physical features and skin colour.
Critics accused her of not only racism, but ableism, classism and of exoticising the young people in her novel with the language she used.
The online storm sparked what some believed to be an unjustified cancellation of the teacher while others felt the world of publishing was getting up to speed with the modern age.
And after over two decades, Clanchy parted ways with her published Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan in 2022.
Now four years later Pan Macmillan has since apologised to the writer as well as ‘many others’ who found themselves mired by the scandal.
Kate Clanchy, the author of Some Kids i Taught and What They Taught Me, has received an apology from her publishers foru years after she was cancelled amid a racism row
Kate Clanchy following an Investiture ceremony at Buckingham Palace on February 7, 2019
They detailed the outcry as a ‘regrettable series of events’ in the global publishers past.
Clanchy told the BBC that she ‘never felt supported’ by her publishers, not even ‘for a minute’ during the controversy. ‘They were absolutely unsupportive,’ she said.
The author, who continues to deny the allegations against her writing, revealed she not only lost out on work but was cut out by her peers.
And in her darkest moments, she considered taking her own life. ‘I really wanted to die for a very long time,’ Clanchy added. Critics of the book also claim they too suffered because of the scandal, saying they were disparaged and attacked in the fallout for calling out a novel they believed to contain harmful stereotypes.
Internal emails, seen by the BBC, indicate how Picador was struggling to decide whether to back its writer or to embrace the negative feedback.
The events transpired in the year after George Floyd’s murder in May 2020 and tackling institutional racism became the top of the agenda for most British firms.
A press release which supported Clanchy was drafted up on August 4, 2021, detailing how she had been ‘a force for good in the worlds of education and publishing’.
It also spoke of how the author had ‘transformed the lives of many young people’ in her decades of work. But, this statement never saw the light of day.
Picador instead went with an alternative statement in response to criticism surrounding the book.
On August 9, 2021, they released a statement which read: ‘We want to apologise profoundly for the hurt we have caused, the emotional anguish experienced by many of you who took the time to engage with the text.’
Although Clanchy and the publisher called it quits a few months later, the aftermath of the controversy continued to plague both her and critics.
Pan Macmillan’s CEO Joanna Prior, who became part of the company after Clanchy had left,’ told the BBC she was ‘sorry for the hurt’ caused to Clanchy and others.
‘This was clearly a regrettable series of events in Pan Macmillan’s past,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry for the hurt that was caused to Kate Clanchy and many others’.