Photo of Clare Sambrook

About Clare Sambrook

Clare Sambrook's acclaimed debut novel, Hide & Seek, came out in more than a dozen languages in 2005, becoming a New York Times editor’s choice and a Daily Mail book club selection. Hide & Seek was short-listed for the YoungMinds Award and long-listed for the Prince Maurice Prize. It is a Canongate title.

Clare has taught fiction at the Arvon Foundation alongside Kamila Shamsie and Liz Jensen, and performed at festivals including Edinburgh, Harrogate and Hay.

In her other life as a reporter Clare won both the Paul Foot Award and the Bevins Prize for outstanding investigative journalism in 2010. Her work revealed government attempts to mislead Parliament and the public about medical evidence that children were being harmed in immigration detention.

At the Foot Awards, Private Eye’s Ian Hislop said Clare had exposed ‘the cosy relationship between Government, civil servants and private companies running detention centres for profit’.

Handing over the Bevins Prize, the BBC’s Andrew Marr said she had ‘thrust her campaign as hard as she could up the nether regions of those in power’.

With six friends Clare co-founded the citizens’ campaign End Child Detention Now in 2009. (Her friends volunteer with the registered charity Refugee Action York who welcome donations large and small.)

In the past Clare exposed deception and incompetence around the UK lottery and corruption at the Olympics. With Andrew Jennings, she co-authored The Great Olympic Swindle, short-listed for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award in 2000. Before all that she was a financial reporter on the Daily Telegraph.

Clare gave evidence before the House of Lords Communications Committee during their 2011 inquiry into the future of investigative journalism. She taught on the Guardian’s investigative journalism Masterclass series in 2013, and is an occasional speaker at universities.

Currently a contributing editor at OurKingdom, the UK section of openDemocracy, Clare writes for Private Eye and The Guardian, among others. She is longlisted for the 2013 Orwell Prize for Journalism, and really will complete the second novel soon.

If you’d like to discuss commissioning or speaking engagements, please contact Clare.