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What Is she doing here: a refugee's story (paperback edition published as Antigona and me)

What Is She Doing Here recounts the story of the writer’s friendship with ‘Antigona’ a refugee from Kosovo, and, through this prism, reflects on contemporary migration into Britain, the history of the Kosovan conflict, the culture of the Balkans, contemporary feminism and the politics of housework. It draws on histories and literature of the Balkans, UN reports, and feminist books and essays and the author’s autobiography as well as several years of interviews with Antigona. The book extends Clanchy’s writing range from poetry to long-form prose and is innovative and inventive in style, using poetic lists, short essays and imaginative storytelling in ways which draw more on contemporary creative non-fiction than on traditional biography. Marina Benjamin in The Sunday Telegraph identifies the way that the book engages with and redraws the parameters of the life-writing genre, observing that “in this long-form writing style that is, for her, a new departure, she also displays a wonderful feel for narrative nuance... Clanchy has done a marvellous thing…she reminds us both of the solidarity that exists between women, and of how far feminism - not just as an ideology, but as a system governing economic transaction - has yet to go.” In foregrounding experiential knowledge and the gender politics of the day-today What Is She Doing Here refers out to the wider structures of feminist theory and offers a new way of understanding the politics of mother-love and the balance between the rich and poor.