Clare's first bookRunning for the Hills (2006) is an acclaimed memoir, 'the equivalent of a collection of poems by Ted Hughes - or even Wordsworth' according to John Carey in the Sunday Times [1] It won the Somerset Maugham Award and saw Clare shortlisted for Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2007.
His second, Truant: Notes from the Slippery Slope, a contribution the debate about cannabis, led Carlo Gebler in the Irish Times to advise 'Get your stoner friend a copy.
His acclaimed account of the ships, oceans and crews he encountered on voyages from Felixstowe to Los Angeles, and from Antwerp to Montreal, Down to the Sea in Ships (2014) was judged 'a lyrical, heartfelt and eye-opening chronicle' 'Both romantic and realistic, written from the heart but crafted with a seafarer’s passionate precision, reported The Independent [4] the book won the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year.
Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot won the Branford Boase Award for Best Debut Children's Book, the judges commenting 'Horatio Clare writes about nature as well as T.H.White [5] In 2015 he won the Royal Geographical Society / Neville Shulman Challenge Award, to tell the story of the fate of the world's rarest bird.
"Busy and vigorous humanity is the subject to which Clare is best suited; he has a sharp ear for it, and thanks to Clare's generosity toward his subjects, the wealth of backstory and anecdote in his Orison practically hums with it," commented the Times Literary Supplement [6] In 2017 Chatto and Windus published Icebreaker – A Voyage Far North, the record of a journey around the Bothnian Bay with the Finnish government's Icebreaker Otso.
A New Statesman Book of the Year, the Economist commented, 'Light fills his writing... Mr Clare is a great enjoyer -- of people, landscape, and above all of language.'
'As travel writer, nature writer, memory retriever and, I would add, prose-poet of mesmerising lyricism, Horatio Clare is a celebrant and observer of what is lovely, less lovely and sometimes, thankfully, absurd in the world,' wrote Juliet Nicolson in The Spectator [8] Heavy Light: A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing appeared in 2021, published by Chatto & Windus.
'What a gift,' wrote Megan Andrew in the Sunday Times, 'having such an articulate agent, reporting back from the far edges of the mind.
[11] It is a Sunday Times Best Self-help Book of 2024 [12] Born in London, Clare grew up on a hill farm in the Black Mountains of South Wales.