I left Sydenham High school in 1982, taking a year out at the Sorbonne in Paris – and exploring Paris and other parts of France – before going up to Oxford to read Modern Languages. I studied French and Spanish: later, I learned Dutch.

I’ve always been a traveller. For me, both literature and languages are a way of moving further afield – out of a world where it’s easy and comfortable into a jungle of new ways of saying things. Which makes you think differently and see things from new angles. Funnily enough English and Art were my favourite subjects at school but literature is a passion, languages were a challenge, and I liked the idea of working abroad.

As it was, I ended up living and working in France, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands, and spent some time in Russia, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic so over those years I certainly fed the travel bug.

All that time I was writing – both for work and for myself, though I only started publishing my own writing later, after my third daughter was born and when I stopped being a writer professionally. Somehow all that – and moving to Scotland, where it’s beautiful and there’s a lot of physical space – gave me the headspace I needed to complete a Masters at St Andrews and focus on my poetry.

I’d had a wonderful English teacher at Sydenham called Miss Vincent: she told me I should be a writer. I wasn’t a particularly obedient student back in the day, but funnily enough I ended up doing what I was told when I was in pigtails.

My mother was a painter and she said to me the best painters look more than they actually paint. I think if I had any tips at all for younger writers it would be the same – to read more than you write: read an entire mountain of books by wonderful writers. Read classics. Read new writing. Read books in translation. Then write what you feel, not what you think people want you to write. Finally, while it’s great to ask for opinions and advice, in the end yours is the one that matters for your own writing.

Claudia Daventry read French and Spanish at Oxford then went on to complete a Masters in poetry in the School of English at St Andrews. Her work has been widely published in journals, anthologies and reviews and has won many awards, including first prize in the Bridport, Ruskin and Hippocrates Prizes, the Philip Larkin, Wigtown and McLellan awards and shortlistings for the Moth and Poetry London prizes. In 2024 her poem Sagrada Familia took first prize in the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine for the second time, (after her ‘neurodivergent’ poem for My Valentine In An fMRI Scanner was awarded first prize in 2019)She is currently working on bringing together a full collection: her solo chapbooks are The Oligarch Loses His Patience and What Grandma Said, both from Templar.