Katrina Porteous

Website: http://www.katrinaporteous.co.uk

Katrina Porteous is a poet, historian and broadcaster. Her particular interests include the inshore fishing community of the Northumberland coast, and the cultural and natural history of that area.

Katrina was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, and grew up in County Durham. She graduated from Trinity Hall, Cambridge, with a double first in History in 1982, studied at Berkeley and Harvard Universities in the USA on a Harkness Fellowship, and has lived in her grandparents’ house on the Northumberland coast, working as a freelance writer, since 1987.

Her poetry has won many national awards, including a Gregory Award (1989), an Arts Council Writer’s Bursary (1993) and an Arts Foundation Award (2003). As well as poetry in English, she occasionally writes in Northumbrian dialect. In 1999 she accompanied two Northumbrian shepherd-poets to the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Nevada, U.S.A.

Katrina’s first major collection, The Lost Music (Bloodaxe 1996), concentrated on the Northumbrian fishing community. She has also explored this subject in prose in Beadnell - a History in Photographs (Northumberland County Library 1990), Beadnell Harbour 200th Anniversary Harbour in Trouble(1998) and The Bonny Fisher Lad (People's History 2003). Katrina’s other publications include a long dialect poem, The Wund an’ the Wetter (with piper Chris Ormston, Iron Press 1999), Turning the Tide, a collaboration with two artists on the Durham coast (Easington 2001), Dunstanburgh (Smokestack 2004) and Longshore Drift (with artist James Dodds, Jardine Press 2005).

Katrina’s poetry is also included in many anthologies, most recently Tweed Rivers, new writing and art inspired by the rivers of the Tweed catchment, edited by Ken Cockburn and James Carter (Luath Press and platform projects, 2005). Katrina’s three-part poem about the River Tweed is accompanied by photographs by Susheila Jamieson.