Calamity with a K

Some notes on professional jealousy

‘It is much easier to decide someone’s career makes you feel bad because they are morally reprehensible than because you envy their success.. I suspect Clanchy’s career success was her original sin in the eyes of the writers who set out to dismantle her career.’ James Marriott in The Times

I want to look at professional envy as cause of my cancellation, and the actions of a group I think may have been motivated by it; a group Anthony Anaxagorou refers to in the podcast Anatomy of a Cancellation as consisting of ‘about fifteen’ ‘writers and academics’ sharing their frustrations with Some Kids. The group seems to have come together in 2020 at the time I won the Orwell Prize. At this point, someone created a twitter handle, @Calamity with a K whose sole purpose was to persecute me.

Since writing this piece, I’ve been sent the full WhatsApp records of an allied group which shows, as you might expect, Monisha Rajesh and Sunny Singh working eagerly together on my cancellation. This essay, though, will focus more on the less-noticed men involved and on a subset of a subset of the literary world: not just poets, but poet teachers, or as they started calling themselves in 2020, educators.

Poetry is a jealous world because the rewards, in either money or attention, are sparse and the competition is huge. Some of the very few sources of funding and status come from education. It’s easy to see this sort of funding, and indeed public attention, as a finite pie from which a few people are getting (your) slice.

In 2021, it was tempting to focus on mine. I’d won the Orwell Prize for Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, my teaching memoir. In 2018 England, Poems from a School, my anthology of poems by young people I’d taught had enjoyed a huge reception and sold nearly 10,000 copies. This was followed in 2020 by How To Grow Your Own Poem, a book created to make poetry writing accessible. This book had sold about 6000 copies in the summer of 2021. These last two numbers are of course small in book terms, but they are large in poetry terms where 500 is an excellent run for a collection. These books were not in any way making me rich – the royalties for England had gone first to payments to the young poets and then to two charities, while HGYOP, which took a solid year to write, had only recently earned out its £10,000 advance – but they may have appeared to be doing so in a tiny, jealous world where book advances are often not even given.

And above all of course there were my students’ poems, so often shared and liked on my twitter account, some up to 48 thousand times. It must have been frustrating for other educators to have these frequently cited, particularly by grant givers, as the kind of thing they might easily produce. Those poems had been created by ten years work in a single school, through cooperation with a fantastic English department and a couple of outstanding librarians, with the support of a visionary headteacher and pastoral leads and deputy heads and social workers and two universities and several charities. We’d made a whole, multilingual poetry culture, a place where some students went to a poetry workshop every week for seven years. That wasn’t replicable in a couple of workshops or the few weeks of funding typical of a poet educators’ grant. The best way out of such a comparisons may have seemed to be to discredit my project and with it those poems.

I do think Anthony Anaxagorou may have felt envious. His book, How to Write It had been published at the same time as Grow Your Own Poem but was not cutting through. Neilson bookscan shows the book sold 1798 copies between 2020 and 2024. In my view that that was because Grow Your Own Poem was a richer, more useful book, aimed at teachers as well as individuals. Anaxagorou, though, may have felt that my book was taking his audience, and with it opportunities such as competition judging and advisory posts to young writers.

The Calamity group, Anaxagorou said on the podcast, was frustrated that their objections to Some Kids ‘couldn’t be heard’. However all the usual means of literary criticism were available to them – and some with extra reach. For example, in October 2020 the academic Sandeep Parmar, who worked closely with Anaxagorou, published an essay on contemporary poetry Still not a British Subject. This essay did not have difficulty being heard. It was free to download and, in the tedium of lockdown, was read more than 16,000 times, almost the reach of a broadsheet newspaper. It certainly reached all of the poetry scene, freshly nervous from the dramatic cancellations of Toby Martinez de las Rivas and Jenny Lindsay in the UK, and, in the United States, the defenestration of the popular Poetry Foundation editor, Don Share, who had published a dramatic monologue using the n-word in the same month as George Floyd was killed.

Parmar’s essay aimed some of the rhetoric and accusations that had brought down Share at UK targets. The last section is devoted to condemning England, Poems from a School. Parmar represents me as an extreme racist teaching English as ‘a linguistic and disciplinary tool of colonial domination’. The anthology as a whole is a lie: to appreciate it is to be fooled, ‘beguiled by the benevolence of whiteness.’ Parmar also began the hunt for phrases ‘wholly exploitative and reductive, reminiscent of colonial-era pseudo-scientific taxonomies of race’ in Some Kids.

If Parmar had tried to publish her allegations in a broadsheet newspaper an editor would have balked at the libelous real world slurs on my character: academics, used to all accusations being unreal, would merely find themselves themselves ‘unsettled’, a wrigglesome state indicating a delicate sensibility. The essay’s salad of fashionable, vague, damaging terms was a powerful first strike for the Calamity group because it suggested that literary criticism and out of context quotation was a valid way of diagnosing real world child abuse. In retrospect, that was when I should have sued because my teaching reputation was valuable not only to me but to the people I taught and published.

The essay travelled well through literary networks – it was being discussed, for example, in Pan Macmillan in August 2021. It went especially well it seems, in Edinburgh in 2020. This was the base of Parmar’s colleague Dave Coates and the trans activist poet Harry Josephine Giles. This pair had recently brought about the successive cancellation of poets Toby Martinez de las Rivas and Jenny Lindsay. Following the publication of Parmar’s essay, several Edinburgh based readers wrote reviews of Some Kids on Goodreads echoing its phrases. Most notable of these was one by a trans activist and youth worker for LGBT Scotland, a signatory to Josephine Giles’ open letter to the SPL, Ceridwen Ball. Ceridwen chose to out herself in late 2022

Ceridwen added some false quotations - ‘slanty eyes’ ‘Jewish nose’ to Parmar’s phrases and opened her review by falsely claiming to be a teacher. She was in a powerful position: safely anonymous and unregulated by Goodreads, she could pretend to professional knowledge, libel and misquote as she liked while I had to bear the real world consequences of her words in my professional life. In February 2022, still safely anonymous, she worked with Monisha Rajesh to claim that I tried to get her sacked from her teaching job and had been ‘in hiding’ as a consequence.

It should be self-evidently impossible to get an anonymous avatar sacked from an imaginary job, but people still challenge me with this fantasy to this day.

Ceridwen’s review was so extreme that it started another life on Goodreads. An argument developed as to whether I was an extreme racist or a leftie Hamas supporter. In July 2021 I ran a series on online workshops in schools in Gaza and received quite a lot of far right abuse via my university email again accusing me of being pro-Hamas. At the same time, my Syrian student Amineh came under fire on Twitter from Chimene Suleyman. Looking for the source of it all, I looked at Goodreads and found the Ceridwen review. And then I made the mistake the group had perhaps been waiting for and overreacted on twitter. Immediately, in swung the Calamity group with a huge volley of tweets, among them this, from Anaxagorou.

.

(Anyone concerned for Anaxagorou at this point might like to know that I had in fact taught in his local comprehensive in leafy Barnet, but I wouldn’t have dreamt of working in the grammar school he himself attended which was one of the most exclusive in the country. It’s remarkable they didn’t teach him the correct use of the apostrophe.

I’d known Anaxagorou since the day in 2016 when he rolled up late to my school in a sports car and tried to park in the headteacher’s spot. We both worked for the charity First Story and he was the designated visiting writer. He seemed to me the epitome of the guest poet a teacher dreads: the one who insists on their special relationship with the kids, not yours, who sides with the class disrupters, who implies that teachers are dull sticks, who leaves the clearing up, both of tables and upset, to you. I found him macho and patronising with older women teachers, preening and strutting with the girls. Mostly, though, I thought his poems were the opposite of what I was trying to teach. No “wow words” was one of my very few rules as a writing teacher – never use a vague, ostentatious word when a short exact one is available. Anaxagorou’s poems were litanies of wow words. His tweet though, showed what an effective way of writing this could be. The word salad allowed him to imply I was an abuser of children, and yet, almost because the bad grammar, it had an ineffable vagueness. All that lingered was the slur.

Anaxagorou’s accusations were matched, in the same hour, by tweets by his friend Chimene Suleyman

and from Calamity with a K,

This last was a straight libel: I was of course a QTS teacher. I note four things here: 1) Calamity with a K chooses to quote tweet the libel. 2) The account he is quote tweeting from, @Jemmalou18, was created that day and posted only that tweet in its whole existence. 3) When you create a new twitter account you are offered a handle based on the email you log in with. 4) Jemma Lou is the name of Nikesh Shukla’s wife.

Nikesh Shukla was another prominent ‘educator’ and a link between many of the Calamity with a K group. Shukla founded the Jhalak Prize with Sunny Singh, (she continues to own the prize with her wealthy family) and was in the publicity stages of a book he had co-edited with Chimene Suleyman, The Good Immigrant. He was a friend of and collaborator with Josephine Giles and Anaxagorou. Like Anaxagorou, he was about to publish a ‘How to Write’ book, this one contracted - for a much higher advance than my Grow Your Own Poem - by Russell Brand’s editor at Pan Macmillan, Carole Tonkinson.

I’d met Shukla just once, at an event for young writers and their teachers. He talked for a long time about a youth project he had run in the past. I sensed insecurity and talked for a much shorter time about my ongoing project, but I couldn’t prevent my students reading their brilliant short stories and poems. I fear that they made Shukla look a little inauthentic. Now Shukla could get his own back. He didn’t tweet on his own much, but he did intervene at Pan Macmillan through his editor Tonkinson. In this email, the Director of Comms knows his first name and can’t spell mine. She has not read my book.

The meeting mooted in the email took place with - I was told by someone present - Shukla contributing on Tonkinson’s phone. I wasn’t even told about it until after the damning statement had been publicly issued.

At the same time as the meeting was going on, Shukla was busy on twitter. He found Philip Pullman commenting on a thread about Ayn Rand and connected it with the Calamity cause.

A short time later, Suleyman and many others were connecting Pullman’s comments, left at 11.15 am on the 9th of August UK time, with a set of comments against Suleyman created by US trolls below a subtweet two days previously, on the evening of the 7th of August.

To cement this connection, Shukla organised an open letter with the magazine Bad Form, repeating the allegation in wow words. He got a young Muslim woman to write the letter.

Carole Tonkinson congratulated him. Then he deleted his twitter account.

Behind the scenes Shukla continued to pull other strings. At the Royal Society of Literature, where he had recently been on the council, he worked with current council member Inua Ellams to prevent Marina Warner, the president, make a statement in support of me. Ellams - another prominent educator - organised protests at my agents, also his agents, RCW.

Together, Ellams and Anaxagorou approached First Story where they both worked, where the royalties of England, Poems from a School were sent, and where the royalties of Friend, the follow up anthology, were also intended to go. First Story wrote to me to decline future royalties. At the same time the Forward Foundation, where I had been a voluntary education advisor, expunged all the teaching materials I had created over several years and terminated – over the heads of the teachers and academics involved - a long-considered grant application we had been working on. The Forward Foundation CEO, Mónica Parle , spoke to me on the phone about this. She had known me and my work for many years because she had formerly worked at First Story. She had personally seen and overseen hundreds of consent forms and dozens of grant applications. She wasn’t talking about my teaching. She had become convinced, she told me, that I had caused the online racial harassment of Monisha Rajesh, Sunny Singh and Chimene Suleyman. I tried asking her what she meant but to no avail. It was a sickening, astonishing conversation, not just because years of work were going down the drain but because a sensible person was talking nonsense seriously, as if she had joined a cult.

The cancelling of that grant application didn’t mean more opportunities for my cancellers. It had been a scheme to work with PGCE students to help them realise their own creativity and teach creatively: it needed someone with a PGCE themselves. The Forward Foundation no longer undertakes much education work: that pie simply shrank. I think that is true more widely of the cancellation too. When the young poets were said to be victims of abuse they were also traduced. They can no longer be proud of the poems in England, Poems from a School or of the time in their lives when they wrote them. The enterprise of teaching poetry in general was also diminished because such dark suspicions and extreme punishments were seen to be the consequences of it.

Individual cancellers though, may have done quite well. Apart from the champagne, Carole Tonkinson revived Sunny Singh’s literary career by publishing her at her new publishing house, Bonnier Books. Ellams continues to be a wealthy and successful man with his own company and several trusteeships. Shukla’s ‘How To Tell Your Story’ sold fewer than 3000 copies and his ‘Good Agency’ folded in 2024 but The Good Immigrant company of which he is sole owner has more than £120,000 in the bank so business, I assume, is still good. Next year, he will publish his first collection of poems, Juice, with Anaxagorou’s Art Council funded Outspoken Press. Anaxagorou and Parmar went on to get several grants together. Anaxagorou is now a prominent figure in British poetry, especially in education. On the Radio 4 podcast he was asked no questions about professional jealousy and was happy to tell isteners that he had no regrets about my cancellation, I’d brought it all on myself.