Welcome

A warm welcome to my website.

For information about my work as a teacher and creative writing tutor, please go to my Workshops page.

There’s background information on the About page and I post regularly at Home.

To discuss poetry readings, commissions, residencies or anything else, please send me an email.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Cliff Yates

“the guru” – GUARDIAN

“passionate about poetry” – TIMES EDUCATIONAL SUPPLEMENT

“Cliff Yates is one of my favourite poets, writing in an idiom I’d like to call ‘Skelmersdale Mystic/Domestic’ if he was in a band that band would produce hit singles that would linger in your head for years and if he was a greengrocer his vegetables would always be startling shapes. There’s childhood here, and love, and a way of seeing the world with the wrappers off that is, ultimately, Yatesian” – IAN MCMILLAN.

“The work that Cliff Yates has done for poetry with children, and for children with poetry, is exceptional and heartening. He is at once expert and inspiring – always proving how necessary it is to recognise that ‘creating’ is a vital part of ‘educating’ “– ANDREW MOTION.

“Cliff Yates is an absolutely remarkable workshop leader and teacher of poetry whose own pupils have consistently won prizes in poetry competitions for young people. He is one of the best in the country working as a writer in schools. Highly experienced as a teacher, he can inspire staff as well as pupils through workshops which get to the heart of what writing is all about” – CHRIS MEADE, Director of if:book & former director of the Poetry Society.