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WACL Dinner with Guest Speaker Clare Pooley
November 19, 2024 @ 6:45 pm - 10:30 pm
Date: Tuesday 19th November
Time: 6:45 – 10:30pm
Venue: The Dorchester Hotel, 53 Park Lane, W1K 1QA
Dress code – suits and sparkles (no black tie)
Tables seat 10 guests but can take maximum 12.
If you do not know your guests details when making the booking, add the members name or TBC.
NO REFUNDS AFTER TUESDAY 12TH NOVEMBER 2024
Speaker Biography:
After graduating from Newnham College, Cambridge in 1991, Clare Pooley joined J Walter Thompson as a trainee ‘suit.’ By the age of 30 she was on the board, and was promoted a few years later to Managing Partner. Over the next decade, Clare worked across most of the agency’s major brands, from Persil to Kit Kat, Barclays Bank to Rolex watches.
When Clare’s third child was born, in 2008, Clare left JWT to spend more time with her family. She also spent more time drinking. By 2015, Clare was easily downing ten bottles of wine a week. She knew she had to quit and, by way of therapy, started writing a blog called Mummy was a Secret Drinker under a pseudonym.
That blog went accidentally viral, and within a year had had over a million hits. In December 2017, the story of Clare’s first year sober was published by Hodder and Stoughton as a memoir – The Sober Diaries (described as Bridget Jones Dries Out). Clare was interviewed on Woman’s Hour, Lorraine, The Steve Wright Show and Victoria Derbyshire, and she was serialised in The Daily Mail. The book sold over 200,000 copies, and Clare still gets emails every week from readers all over the world saying that her story transformed their lives.
By now, writing was Clare’s new addiction, so she turned to fiction. Her debut novel – The Authenticity Project – went to a 6-way auction in the UK and again in the USA. It was a Radio 2 Book Club pick, winner of the RNA debut novel award, was translated into thirty languages and became a New York Times Bestseller.
Clare then published two further novels – The People on Platform 5 and How to Age Disgracefully. She has now sold well over a million books worldwide.
