Lindsay Clarke (born 1939, Halifax, West Yorkshire) is a British novelist. He was educated at Heath Grammar School in Halifax and at King's College Cambridge. He worked in education for many years, in Africa, America and the UK, before becoming a full-time writer. Clarke lectures in creative writing at Cardiff University, is a Creative Consultant to The Pushkin Trust in Northern Ireland, and teaches writing workshops in Frome and London. Four radio plays were broadcast by BBC Radio 4, and a number of his articles and reviews have been published in Resurgence and The London Magazine. Lindsay has one daughter from his first marriage. In 2014 he was awarded a Civil List Pension "in recognition of services to literature."
His novel The Chymical Wedding, partly inspired by the life of Mary Anne Atwood, won the Whitbread Prize in 1989. Clarke's most recent novel is The Water Theatre (published in September 2010 by Alma Booka), of which a review by Antonia Senior in The Times of 28 August said "There is nothing small about this book. It is huge in scope, in energy, in heart...It is difficult to remember a recent book that is at once so beautiful and yet so thought provoking." The Water Theatre was selected as a winner of the inaugural Fiction Uncovered competition in 2011 and was included among The Times's Books of the Year. In 2012 The Water Theatre was chosen as the inaugural e-book publication of The New York Review of Books under their NYRB Lit imprint.