Survivor in an alien land - Kate Clanchy interview

Clanchy, who is best known as an award-winning poet, was out with her son, then a toddler, when her paths crossed with Antigona and her youngest child, a boy a few years older. Clanchy had seen them in the street before. But that morning on the pavement, something passed between them. A connection. Clanchy said: "Do you want a job?"

"I am an impulsive person," she tells me, seven years on, over lunch in a hotel in London. "I intuitively felt that here was somebody I really liked and it would be fine, and she also had that sense about me. It didn't feel odd at all, until I went home and told my husband and he said 'What?'"

Antigona became Clanchy's cleaner, then her nanny, also her friend. Clanchy began to write about her, first impromptu jottings in secret, later with her blessing. She describes her book, What is She Doing Here? A Refugee's Story, as "somewhere between a memoir and a biography and a book of essays". It's not just Antigona's story, but the story of their friendship and the differences between their two worlds.

Antigona, who leaps from its pages as indomitable, beautiful, determined, endlessly resourceful, was delighted by the idea. "Good," she said. "And then a feature film, actually. Mini-series."

"I always underestimate her, even though I've known her such a long time," says Clanchy. "I think she had already thought that that would be a good idea. She does have quite a strong sense of herself as a special person, a pioneer."

Antigona fled Kosovo in 1999 when four Serb policemen came looking for her estranged husband who had connections with the Kosovan Liberation Army. They held Antigona at gunpoint, then threw her young daughter from the roof, breaking her hip. Before they returned to burn her home, she made a run for the forest with her three children. They travelled to Italy in a dangerously overloaded rubber dinghy, then on to England in a lorry.

One of the Malsi people, who live in the mountain ranges that straddle Kosovo and Albania, she was already a victim of that culture's misogynistic moral code, the Kanun of Lek. Forced to marry her violent husband because he raped her, she managed to divorce him, despite pressure from her relatives to stay in the marriage.

On a return visit to Kosovo, she was united with her mother and sisters, whom she had presumed were dead in the war. Now, Clanchy says, it's not unusual for her to be shopping in Tesco while on the phone berating her sister, who is killing chickens on an Albanian mountainside.

It isn't hard to see why Antigona caught Clanchy's imagination, though it took four years for the snippets she was writing to begin to form themselves into a book. Clanchy, who was born and raised in Scotland, was first acclaimed as a writer when her debut poetry book, Slattern, in 1996, won almost every award going, including the Somerset Maugham and the Forward Prize. Her most recent volume was Newborn in 2004.

She now writes radio plays and used the techniques of writing drama to give the book pace and plot. "I succeeded more than I intended – I didn't expect it to be a page-turner," she says. "But I think it is. I know it's a good story, but it's not such an exceptional story. If you went down to my local refugee centre you could hear ten such stories in an afternoon."

At the same time, she brings the story home to us by recording how she clashes with Antigona over everyday things. Antigona scorns Clanchy's organic veg and middle-class "woven carrier bag" liberalism. Clanchy treasures her "ethnic" rag rug, while Antigona, taught to make and mend all her life, joyously revels in Primark. Clanchy watches Antigona feeding a toddler, a special kind of delight in her eyes because she knows what it's like to see children go hungry.

She tells Antigona's story in the way it was told to her, unfolding layer on layer, admitting that the first verion she heard was not entirely true. It happened all right – the burning village, the rubber dinghy, the lorry – but modifications had to be made to tick the right boxes so Antigona could claim asylum in Britain.

Clanchy, who says she always held "liberal" views on refugees, does so more passionately now. "In one way, I see everything as more complicated. I am less likely to see refugees as heroes or victims, and more likely to think of them as complex, responsible individuals with multiple reasons for coming here. On the other hand, my views have hardened and simplified: I think we have an absolute duty to welcome refugees into this country – all refugees, not just selected groups.

"I could have smoothed out that story, I could have had her tell the truth from the beginning, but I wanted to show how it is. She's absolutely still a refugee, but it's not quite as straightforward as that. We expect refugees to come here, and the very same day tell their full story, demonstrating that they were tortured, and hand over their passports. It's appalling."

And she wanted to write about a refugee in a way that was different to the usual traumatic stories in the paper which we can disconnect ourselves from so easily. "Because refugees and immigrants are so connected to us, they're doing so many jobs, I bet they're in the kitchen of this hotel now. They're everywhere, and we depend on them and use them."

In particular, middle-class women are connected to refugee and immigrant women, who form the bulk of the army of cleaners and nannies we fall back on when we discover we can't "have it all". In her book, Clanchy explores her own unease at this relationship. Have we, a generation of feminists, simply created an underclass of female workers, operating below the radar, without employment rights?

At the root of this is what Clanchy calls "The Problem": the unrealistic expectations that modern women will have fulfilling careers, beautiful children and spotless homes, and the failure of feminism to create a more family-friendly work environment. Antigona is a bright, gifted woman. Is Clanchy stifling her potential by employing her as a nanny? On the other hand, it's far better than her last job, working shifts in a sweet factory.

"I was very disappointed in myself not to be able to have children and a career and do every single thing myself," Clanchy says. "We have all these women who are connected into our lives and I really wanted to write about that, and not pretend that there weren't any. We don't like to talk about it, we find it embarrassing. I hope I've overcome my embarrassment to be reasonably celebratory because it is a good thing, and a genuine friendship."

The book leaves us in no doubt of this. In fact, the thing which nearly drove a wedge between Clanchy and Antigona had nothing to do with this working relationship. It happened when Antigona's daughter became pregnant by her black boyfriend and Antigona, who had survived so much and crossed so many boundaries, exploded in a tirade of racist vitriol.

"That was absolutely terrible. I challenged her about it over and over again – and she's quite scary, so that was quite brave of me! It was really awful because I love her, and I would say she's not racist deep down. But this was the thing she was most scared of, the worst thing she could imagine for her daughter. I thought I'd have to fire her or something, give everything up."

In fact, in time Antigona and her daughter built their own bridges, and are now fully reconciled. But Antigona no longer works for Clanchy, because towards the end of 2006 she lost her fight to remain in his country. Clanchy says she is living illegally in Europe, working as a nanny. They are still in touch, and she plans to share the royalties from the book with her.

To protect her from repercussions, either from the authorities or more personally within the Kosovan/Albanian diaspora, she has changed significant details in the book: all the key names, the location where most of the action takes place. "But I haven't faked the environment at all. It does happen in an EU designated area of poverty, with many ethnic minorities. I've been as truthful as I could."

The anonymity, she says, was at her insistence, not Antigona's. Is she bothered? Is she hell. "I know she's telling people all over the place that she's got copies of the book and she's hugely proud of it. And I keep saying 'Shut up! don't do that!'" Clanchy says. But Antigona still has her eye on the mini-series.

What Is She Doing Here? A Refugee's Story (Picador, 14.99) will be serialised on Woman's Hour, BBC Radio 4, starting on 14 July, starring Fiona Shaw. Kate Clanchy is at the Edinburgh book festival on 13 August.