Clare Best’s brilliant and moving memoir THE MISSING LIST has been selected as one of three finalists for the 2015 Mslexia Memoir Prize. The prize is worth £5,000 and is for previously unpublished women memoirists. The prize was judged by Julie Myerson (memoirist, novelist), Jenny Brown (literary agent) and Jane Martinson (Women's Editor, Guardian). The winners were announced in the March issue of Mslexia.

Andrew O'Hagan describes the memoir as ‘A tapestry of time – brightly coloured, beautifully orchestrated, emotionally pure.’

Clare Best has worked as a bookbinder, a bookseller, an editor and a Creative Writing teacher. She is currently Writer in Residence at the University of Brighton. Clare is a prize-winning poet and the author of three poetry publications – TREASURE GROUND (HappenStance 2009), BREASTLESS (Pighog 2011) and EXCISIONS (Waterloo 2011) which was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize 2012.

Praise for Clare Best:

‘Clare Best writes of the things of the world, and of the moments in our lives, as if they bear within them secrets of mortality that words will never quite have the power to reveal. She writes with scruple and clarity, listening always for the unsaid and the unsayable, watching for the passage of flame into darkness.’ – Michael Hulse

‘Clare Best’s poetry dazzles with the clarity of its chiseled phrases and its measured form. Perhaps the confessional narrative it tells, of encounters with mortality through the loss of her parents and her own preventive double mastectomy, warrants a desire for such poetic control.’ - Eva C. Karpinski, Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme