Sarah Clement is an author and researcher.
She has won a London Writers Award, a Creative Future Literary Award and has an MA in Creative and Life Writing. Her current work has been supported by a grant from Arts Council England. She is represented by AMP Literary.
Sarah has a PhD in psychology and diploma in psychoanalytic psychology. After working as a university research fellow and lecturer for twenty years, she is now an independent scholar.
She writes about our inner lives through both a personal and a research lens.
Sarah Clement
Writer
Lostling
I am currently working on a book entitled Lostling: The Era of Mandated Forgetting and the Search for an Invisible Brother.
I was eight when my mother first told me about my eldest brother who died on the cusp of birth. It didn’t make sense: born and dead are opposite words, what did it mean to be both? My brother was stillborn in 1960, a time when such babies were rarely spoken of, were typically unseen by their parents, and buried in unknown graves. Lostling recounts the haunting presence of this baby known only through my parents’ sparse words. Using diaries and other documents found after my mother’s death, I reconstruct the lives of my parents and their quiet grief, then tell of my lost brother’s complicated aftermath and how it rippled through my childhood and beyond.
Losting weaves together my family’s past with the wider story of stillbirth, drawing on historical and social science research, along with cultural representations of this loss in literature, art and film. I have gathered together public testimony from women whose babies were stillborn in what I call the era of mandated forgetting and their voices are threaded through Lostling.
Decades on from when I first learned of my brother and still grappling with the question of what it means when birth and death collide, I began writing Lostling to discover some answers. How did my family respond to this ambiguous and disenfranchised loss? What did it mean for me to be a child born after baby loss – what used to be termed a replacement child and is now often called a rainbow child? What shadow did the lost baby cast on my own experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood? Lostling tells of my decades-on quest to discover and mark my brother's grave and to find ways to commemorate his brief life and the lives of other babies similarly lost.
I see Lostling as a book for everyone interested in birth, death, or grief and how individuals and societies deal with such life matters. I hope it will speak both to readers whose lives have been touched by baby loss and to those who love social history or literary memoir. It tells of the almost universal experience of having ‘ghosts’ of family members who died before we were born but nonetheless have a complex presence in our lives.
Family heirloom
I began working on this book during my MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths. An early draft of the opening is featured in the 2024 Goldfish anthology. The opening of Lostling was selected by The Greene Door Project, winning an agent feedback consultation.
In 2025 I was awarded a Develop Your Creative Practice grant from Arts Council England to further develop Lostling, working with mentoring to explore how to blend history into a memoir (with mentor Julia Blackburn); how to create found poetry from public testimony (with Karen McCarthy Woolf) and how to make visual art to widen my understanding Lostling's themes (with Leni Dothan).
So far I have spoken about my Lostling research at the Death Studies conference in Utrecht in August 2025 and in the Goldsmiths GLITS Seminar series in 2024.
Lostling will shortly go on submission to publishers.
My autobiographical fiction features in these anthologies
I have also written an unpublished memoir and novel, both of which I now see as seedbeds for my current book, Lostling.
My earlier memoir, Unblotting, centred on the themes of silence, articulation and mental health. The memoir was written on the London Writers Award Development Programme in 2021, and in 2020 when I was selected for free mentoring by writer Anna Vaught. Chapters from the book have been shortlisted for the Bridport Short Story Prize 2020 and the First Pages Prize; and longlisted for the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2023; and one is forthcoming in the Flare anthology on chronic illness. The opening of an autofiction novel, Do Not Think of A White Bear, developed from one of the memoir chapters, was published in the 2023 Goldfish anthology.
My earlier novel was A Ton of Feathers, an autobiographical coming-of-age novel. The opening of this novel was selected to appear in the TLC/AM Heath Free Reads Anthology, and was featured in The Literary Consultancy's Showcase. It has been shortlisted in: David Higham Associates Open Day competition; York Festival of Writing Friday Night Live Competition; Retreat West Novel Opening competition ; and longlisted in: Blue Pencil First Novel Award and Novel London Prize. It was chosen for the Spread the Word / Rocking Chair Books agent feedback opportunity and its pitch was a winner in the Cornerstones pitch competition.
Pieces
Here are a selection of my short stories and lyrical essays
Mary Ann, Sadie and Me
This is my lyric essay about pen names, imaginary friends and about the dilemmas of writing trauma. It is also about Frida Kahlo's painting The Two Fridas. The essay was published in the UEA's nonfiction journal Hinterland in 2024.
Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 1939, Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City
Craze
This piece of flash fiction was chosen by Hanif Kureishi as a runner up in the Kureishi Chronicles writing competition. The theme of the competition was Youth. My piece explores playground crazes and family life.
Bear in Mind
This is the opening of an unpublished novel called Do Not Think of a White Bear, published in the Goldfish Anthology 2023. This work blends autofiction and magical realism and draws on the idea that whilst some people have a Black Dog, others, like the protagonist and her mother, have a White Bear.
'Polar Bear' by Paul Smith, The Sculpture Garden
The Challenge
This story was shortlisted for the Bridport Short Story Prize 2020. It was inspired by Lucian Freud's painting, 'Girl with a Kitten'.
Lucian Freud, Girl with a Kitten [1947]
Tate Archive © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images
I Am a Rock
This story was long listed in Reflex Fiction's Quarterly International Flash Fiction competition 2020. It was written in memory of my father. It is published online in Reflex Fiction and features in Reflex Press's Beguiled by a Wild Thing anthology.
Writ Large
This story was written in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. It is in memory of my mother. The disjointedness of its helix format gave me a way to write about what I was struggling to articulate. The story appeared in the Mechanics Institute Review's Stories in the Time of Covid-19 edition.
Ray
My allegorical story, 'Ray', was chosen as a winning story by Liar's League for their event on the theme of Women and Girls where it was read out by an actress Miranda Harrison at The Phoenix, London.
There was an old lady
This story was written in response to Creative Future's call for pieces on the theme of chemistry. It is about both pharmaceutical and human chemistry. The story won me a Creative Future Literary Award 2018. I read part of this story at the Creative Future Showcase in the London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre. It is published in an anthology, Chemistry.
Olive at the Gallery
This short story is about identity, madness and art. It is based on Redon's painting, Ophelia among the Flowers. The story is forthcoming in ACE-funded recovery anthology A Wild and Precious Life. The anthology was published by Ubound in 2021. This story was also highly commended in the Liars' League & National Gallery short story competition.
Ophelia among the Flowers, Odilon Redon, 1905-8, National Gallery
Safe as Houses
'Safe as Houses' is a short story that grew from a Word Factory workshop about place. It explores what happens when something about a house mirrors the protagonist's past and her inner experience. The story appeared in The Selkie.
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Advent
This short story was published in The Book of Godless Verse in response to a call for pieces about Christmas and rituals people handmake in the face of life's every day messiness. The story is about a canine commemoration.
Dandelion
This short story about family mealtimes was published in a Special Issue of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies on Offering and Receiving Food. It is also an early version of a chapter in A Ton of Feathers.
Daisies
This is my first published piece of creative writing. It is a flash fiction story about grief. It appeared in LossLit.
Research
My love of research started when, for my undergraduate dissertation, I analysed essays teenagers wrote describing their imagined futures, comparing girls' accounts with those of boys. This led on to my PhD in Psychology at Goldsmiths. In my thesis I developed a psychosocial model to understand women's journeys into different types of employment, looking particularly at those who went in male-dominated jobs and professions.
My interest in maternity research began when my first son was born by caesarean during my PhD studies. When pregnant with my second son I researched and wrote my book, The Caesarean Experience. For this I analysed birth stories women sent to me and their questionnaire responses, as well as reviewing the literature on experiences of caesarean birth.
After this I became a research fellow at Guys & St Thomas' medical school working on a study about the optimum number of antenatal checkups for women with low risk pregnancies, with me investigating women's views and any psychological effects of reduced antenatal visit schedules. I stayed on at Guys and St Thomas's becoming a lecturer in health services research with the STarNet GP Research network. I helped GPs to develop research on, for example, nurses managing minor illness in patients requesting urgent GP appointments and on a patient-centred questionnaire to assess psychological outcomes of therapy in primary care. In this role I continued doing maternity research, leading a long-term follow-up study on the psychological effects of reduced antenatal visit schedules and another study on women's experiences of internal scans in pregnancy. I also edited the textbook Psychological Perspectives on Pregnancy and Childbirth, developed a woman-centred measure of obstetric intervention and studied how childbirth is portrayed on television.
Photo of a segment of Damien Hurst's Verity, a public statue in Ilfracome
Photos of the Melancholy and Raving Madness statues in Bethlem Museum of the Mind
After personal and family experiences of mental illness, my research focus shifted to mental health and I moved to St George's medical school to work as a research scientist supporting staff undertaking research. There I collaborated on several studies on continuity of care in secondary mental health services and led a study on publication patterns in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
I then became a senior research fellow at London South Bank University, again in a role developing research skills in staff. For my own research I analysed five national newspapers to understand how they reported on schizophrenia and how this might be improved, as well as working on a systematic review of ways to help people with difficulties with literacy and numeracy to better understand health information.
During this time I studied for a diploma in Psychoanalytic Psychology at Birkbeck where I wrote essays on, for example, mothers, daughters and loss in three generations of Melanie Klein's family and on the uncanny in the artworks of Louise Bourgeois.
In 2008 I moved to the Institute of Psychiatry at Kings College London as manager of the SAPPHIRE Programme on Stigma and Discrimination in Mental Health working again as a lecturer in health services research. I led several studies looking at the role of narrative in reducing stigma, comparing the effects of video versus live storytelling, gathering consensus about which types of message are helpful and unhelpful, and carrying out a Cochrane review about mass media interventions to reduce the stigma of mental illness.
I also led studies on stigma as a barrier to mental healthcare seeking. I conducted a large systematic review on stigma and help-seeking which has been read a staggering 200,000 times and cited 3,000 times, as well as developing the BACE questionnaire to measure barriers to help-seeking including stigma (please note, I no longer deal with permissions to use this scale, permission is now given via the procedure outlined here).
I was involved in studies documenting the discrimination experienced by people who use mental health services, and by service users who were also parents. I was particularly pleased to help create a short film, Discrimination Firsthand, to illustrate the various types of mental health-related discrimination we found people experience.
After that, to make time to begin creative writing, I became a part-time freelance researcher. I particularly enjoyed my freelance work with Bethlem Museum of the Mind and with Angela Sweeney on conceptualising trauma-informed mental health care.
In 2022 I returned to Goldmsiths to do an MA in Creative and Life Writing and began working on my book, Lostling. I became interested in the literary theory of postmemory and how it might apply to the generation-after mourning I was writing about in my work on Lostling and to Han Kang's The White Book about her elder sister who died shortly after birth. I presented this work at a GLITS seminar at Goldsmiths.
I am now an independent scholar currently researching the sociocultural history of stillbirth particularly the twentieth century's era of mandated forgetting for the book I'm working on, Lostling. I'm exploring
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ambiguous loss and disenfranchised grief
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trauma transmission across generations
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the 'replacement' or 'rainbow' child
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making I-Poetry from public testimony
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mid-century cemetery and hospital practices around stillbirth
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mourning, memorialisation and re-enfranchisement
I presented my evolving Lostling research at the ASDS international conference on the social study of death in 2025.
You can see full details of all of my academic work on ResearchGate
Art
My dad was an artist and so I grew up around art. When I began creative and life writing in my fifties, I found myself writing about paintings that resonated with the issues I was trying to communicate. You can see three of these ekphrastic (writing based on artworks) stories in the Pieces section of this website. They are based on Frida Kahlo's The Two Fridas' , Lucien Freud's 'Girl with a Kitten' (1947, Tate Archive), and Odilon Redon's 'Ophelia among the Flowers' (2005-8, National Gallery)
The Two Fridas by Frida Kahlo, 1939, Museo de Arte, Mexico City
Girl with a Kitten by Lucien Freud, 19947, Tate Archive, copyright the Lucien Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images
Ophelia among the Flowers by Odilon Redon, 1905-08, National Gallery
While writing Lostling I often found myself preoccupied with an an image. I wondered what would it mean to make artworks to capture these images and to write about them - a kind of self-ekphrasis? With the help of a Develop Your Creative Practice grant from Arts Council England and mentor Leni Dothan, I began artmaking. Sometimes the art I created arose from something I had already written about in Lostling and sometimes the artmaking came first and was a way into the wordmaking.
I made an artist's pamphlet titled Unvanishing showing the artworks I made. These works aim to 'unvanish' my baby brother and his peers, stillborn in an era when hospital and funerary practices made these babies disappear. It has grown from my interest in how traumatic grief passes from one generation to the next and how creative work can be a belated, vicarious act of mourning. The works speak to notions of absence, elegy, remembrance, and ongoingness – the titles of the four pamphlets that make up Unvanishing.
I am drawn to methods – cyanotype printing, casting and tie-dye – which create traces or imprints of something only temporarily present. I incorporate found objects into my work, both domestic (like nappy pins and baby garments) and natural (such as flowers and shells), as nature is what all beings ultimately become. I use digital photography to make single images, photo-series, collages, and films. The phone lens is a mediating eye that helps me look at difficult things. The framing I do during and after taking photographs feels containing, giving edges to the edgeless.
If you would like a copy of the Unvanishing pamphlet, please email me and I can send you either a free PDF copy or a physical version for £10 + £2 UK p&p with all proceeds going to charities supporting people after baby loss past and present.
I also made two short artist's films: Postmemory Box (2:14 mins) and Points of Departure: 1960 and 2024 (9:41 mins). If you would like to view these films, please email me and I will send you a link to access them.
The pamphlets and films will be available soon, pending permissions.
Film still from Postmemory Box
Film still from Points of Departure: 1960 and 2024
I also make artworks on mental health themes which I have shown and sold at the 2024 and 2025 Bethlem Gallery Art Fairs. These are two examples.
Blue, cyanotype print
The Waves, cyanotype print
About
I began creative writing in 2014, completing short writing courses at City Lit, Goldsmiths and The Word Factory. For six years I attended a regular tutored writing workshop led by poet Caroline Natzler. In 2021 I was took part in the year-long London Writers Awards Development Programme. In September 2022 I began studying for a Masters in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths and was awarded an MA with distinction. In 2025 I was supported by a Develop Your Creative Practice grant from Arts Council England to develop hybrid memoir, found poetry and visual art.
I am proud to be a winner of a London Writers Award and a Creative Future Literary Award and am grateful to have been awarded the Katharine Orton Bursary for a Free Read from The Literary Consultancy and free mentoring from author Anna Vaught.
My creative writing has appeared in Hinterland, The Kureishi Chronicles, Liar's League, Reflex Fiction, The Mechanics' Institute Review, LossLit and The Selkie and in four anthologies, including A Wild and Precious Life (Unbound). My work has been listed in twelve competitions including the Bridport Short Story Prize and Queen Mary Wasafari New Writing Prize.
I used the pen name Sadie Nott for my creative writing a number of years and this was a helpful alter ego that enabled me to start writing about myself. Since 2022 all my writing has appeared under my own name of Sarah Clement. I wrote about the complexities of using and losing a pseudonym here.
Before changing direction to focus on creative writing, I worked for twenty years as a research psychologist at various London universities and medical schools. You can read about my research here.
I am now an independent scholar currently researching the sociocultural history of stillbirth for the book I'm working on, Lostling. I'm really enjoying being a researcher once again and the new challenge of communicating research findings in an accessible way and blending them, hopefully seamlessly, with literary memoir.
I am represented by Anna Pallai at AMP Literary.
I have written an email course on memoir structure for the London Writers CentreI which will be run again on my have been a mentor and volunteer ghostwriter with the Ministry of Stories. I live in south London with my husband and have two adult sons.
You can discover more about me in this 2022 TLC showcase and in this 2019 interview with The Nottingham Review.
News & Events
3rd July 2026 SIGNING WITH MY AGENT
I am over the moon today to sign with literary agent Anna Pallai from AMP Literary. Anna and I will work on finlaising the proposal and sample material for my book Lostling: The Era of Mandated Forgetting and the Search for an Invisible Brother ready for it to go on submission to publishers.
30th June 2026 ARTS COUNCIL GRANT ENDS
Today I completed the work funded by my Develop Your Creative Practice Grant from Arts Council England. I've gathered together hundreds of public stories about stillbirth between 1945 to 1985 to help understand the 'era of mandated forgetting'. I've written a series of poems which will be woven through Lostling, the book I am currently working on. And I've made 24 artworks on the theme of 'unvanishing' as a new way to think about absence, mourning and remembrance.
28th August 2025 CONFERENCE PRESENTATION ON LOSTLING
I am presenting a paper entitled 'Reversing a vanishing: Using creative arts to counter the mid-century mandated forgetting of stillbirth' at the DDD Death Studies Conference in Utrecht, Netherlands.
1st January 2025 ARTS COUNCIL GRANT BEGINS
Today I have begin work funded by a Develop Your Creative Practice Grant from Arts Council England.
9th November 2024 AWARDED DYCP ACE FUNDING
Today I was successful in my application for an Develop Your Creative Practice grant from Arts Council England for 'Developing Hybrid Memoir and Stillbirth Arts' enabling me to work with mentors Julia Blackburn, Karen McCarthy Woolf, and Leni Dothan in 2025.
October 2024 AWARDED MA IN CREATIVE AND LIFE WRITING
This month I learned that I had been awarded an MA with distinction in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London.
13th MARCH 2024 TALK ON POSTMEMORY & THE WHITE BOOK
Today I gave a talk at the Goldsmiths Literature Society entitled: 'Does postmemory theory work for individual intergenerational trauma? A close reading of Han Kang's The White Book'.
22nd September 2023 MY ESSAY IS LONGLISTED
Today I learned that the title essay from my collection TIN WOMAN was longlisted for the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.
31st March 2023 MY STORY IS A RUNNER UP
Today I learned that my flash fiction piece, 'Craze', was chosen by Hanif Kureishi as a runner up in his Kureishi Chronicles writing competition. You can read it by scrolling down, here.
30th March 2023 READING - OPENING OF NEW WORK-IN- PROGRESS
Today I joined fellow Goldsmiths MA Creative and Life Writing Students to launch the Goldfish Anthology 2023. At the launch I read the opening to the new manuscript I am working on. This is either autofiction or a memoir with surreal elements and you can read it here.
21st February 2023 MY MEMOIR COURSE BEGINS
Today is the first day of my my free self-paced four-part email course, The Shape of Me: Exploring Structure in Memoir. I wrote the course for Spread the Word as part of their Developing Tutors scheme. Participants can sign up to join up until 14th March 2023.
28th September 2022 BEGAN CREATIVE WRITING MA
Today was the first day at Goldsmiths, University of London where I am studying for an MA in Creative and Life Writing to think more about the why and how of my writing and to work on my next book.
1st July 2022 SHOWCASED BY TLC
Today The Literary Consultancy showcased me and my writing. The showcase includes an extract from my unpublished autobiographical coming of age novel, A Ton of Feathers.
16th MARCH 2022 AGENT REPRESENTATION
I am immensely happy to announce that I am now represented by agent Rukhsana Yasmin from The Good Literary Agency. Update: My agent has since left agenting and I am currently exploring alternative representation.
16th AUGUST 2021 READING - MEMOIR EXTRACT
I am reading an extract from my memoir-in-progress, Unblotting, in the open mic slot of the August Criptic Salon.
17th May 2021 SHORTLISTED FOR FIRST PAGES PRIZE
I am overjoyed that the opening of Unblotting has been shortlisted for the international First Pages Prize, judged by Samatha Chang Director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
13th May 2021 PUBLICATION IN ANTHOLOGY
Today, A Wild and Precious Life was published, a recovery anthology containing my short story 'Olive at the Gallery'.
18th Jan 2021 LONDON WRITERS AWARD
Today I became one of the thirty writers awarded a London Writers Award and will join the LWA Development Programme to work on my memoir, Unblotting.
14th Nov 2020 READING - SHORT STORY
I will be reading my short story 'I Am a Rock' at the online launch of Anita Goveas' new short story collection Families and Other Natural Disasters.
29th Apr 2020 BECOMING MENTORED
I have been selected by author Anna Vaught, author of Saving Lucia and Famished, to receive free mentoring from May - Sept 2020 for the memoir-in-stories I am currently working on.
26th Nov 2019 READING - SHORT STORY
I'm reading my short story 'Olive at the Gallery' and discussing writing and recovery at The Gallery Cafe, Bethnal Green at an event with three other writers from the A Wild and Precious Life anthology and chaired by Lily Dunn.
1st Sep 2019 ON PANEL - PRIMADONNA FESTIVAL
My spoof rejection letter won me a place on the Don't Mess with Writers, We'll Describe You panel chaired by Maxine Mawhinney at the Primadonna Festival 30th Aug - 1st September, Suffolk.
13th Aug 2019 READING - SHORT STORY
My short story, 'Ray' will be read by actress Miranda Harrison at the Liar's League Women and Girls event at The Phoenix on this day.
7th Nov 2018 KATHARINE ORTON BURSARY
I was awarded the Katharine Orton Bursary for a Free Read for A Ton of Feathers from The Literary Consultancy today.
26th Oct 2018 READING - SHORT STORY
I'm reading my short story, 'There was an old lady', at the Creative Future showcase as part of the London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre.
31st July 2018 CREATIVE FUTURE LITERARY AWARD
Today I became one of twelve writers and poets to win a Creative Future Literary Award for underrepresented writers.
26th June 2017 READING - SHORT STORY
I'm reading an extract from my short story, 'Dandelion', at the Fifth BSA Food Study Group Conference: Food & Society 2017 in a Symposium on Offering Food - Receiving Food
9th Sep 2016 READING - NOVEL EXTRACT
I'm reading the opening of my novel, A Ton of Feathers, at the York Festival of Writing Friday Night Live event.
Contact
My agent is Anna Pallai at AMP Literary, email: general@ampliterary.co.uk