Clementine Ewokolo Burnley grew up in Victoria, Cameroon, and has lived between Scotland, Italy and Germany for forty years. She has an M.Sc. in Computational Linguistics from Manchester University and is a part-time, practice-based student at the Research Society for Process Oriented Psychotherapy, studying post-traumatic growth.
She was joint winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize in 2024, and her first book-length collection, Belling the Leopard, is published by Bloodaxe Books in 2026. Her pamphlet Radical Pairings (Ignitionpress, 2023) was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award. She's received an Edwin Morgan Second Life Award (2020), the RSL Sky award (2021) for creative nonfiction, and a Hawthornden Foundation Residency, in Bologna, Italy. The Scottish Poetry Library selected her poem 'How to Eat Frogs' for Best Scottish Poems (2021). In 2023, a sequence of her poems was Highly Commended in the Poetry Business’ International Poetry and Pamphlet Competition. Her poetry film, Paradise Engines was commissioned by Scottish Poetry Library and the Obsidian Foundation as part of the Africa in Motion Festival (2021).
She has brought multi-modal performances of her work to venues including the HAU, Berlin (2018), the Reeperbahn Festival, Hamburg, (2018), the Literary Colloquium Berlin (2019),and Lateral North's The World That Is Shaping Our COAST (2023) in Glasgow.
Clementine’s short fiction has been in the final selection for the Amsterdam Open Book Prize, First Pages Award, Bristol Short Story competition, the Miles Morland Award, the Esalen Emerging Writers Award, and the Bridport Flash Fiction Competition.
She writes regular reviews, short-form fiction and nonfiction pieces for WritersMosaic, a division of the Royal Literary Fund. She's a non-fiction editor at Bending Genres and a Lector for the Royal Literary Fund Reading Round (2025) in Edinburgh.
