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Katrina Porteous was born in Aberdeen, grew up in Co. Durham, and has lived on the Northumberland coast since 1987. She read History at Cambridge and afterwards studied in the USA on a Harkness Fellowship. Many of the poems in her first collection, The Lost Music (Bloodaxe Books, 1996), focus on the Northumbrian fishing community, about which Katrina has also written in prose in The Bonny Fisher Lad (The People's History, 2003). Katrina also writes in Northumbrian dialect, and has recorded her long poem, The Wund an' the Wetter, on CD with piper Chris Ormston (Iron Press, 1999). Her second full-length collection from Bloodaxe, Two Countries (2014), was shortlisted for the Portico Prize for Literature 2015. Katrina has been involved in many collaborations with other artists, including public art for Seaham, Co. Durham, with sculptor Michael Johnson, and two books with maritime artist James Dodds, Longshore Drift (Jardine Press, 2005) and The Blue Lonnen (Jardine Press, 2007). She often performs with musicians, including Chris Ormston, Alistair Anderson and Alexis Bennett. She is particularly known for her radio-poetry, much of it produced by Julian May. One of these poems, Horse, with electronic music by Peter Zinovieff, first performed at Sage Gateshead for the BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking Festival 2011, is published as an artists' book and CD, with prints by Olivia Lomenech Gill (Windmillsteads Books, 2014). Katrina's third full-length collection, Edge (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), draws on three collaborations commissioned for performance in Life Science Centre Planetarium, Newcastle, between 2013 and 2016, with multi-channel electronic music by Peter Zinovieff: Field, Sun and Edge. Sun was part of NUSTEM's Imagining the Sun project for schools and the wider public (Northumbria University, 2016). Edge, a poem in four moons incorporating sounds collected from space missions, was broadcast as a Poetry Please Special on BBC Radio 4 in 2013.
'A writer chronicling the life of the land through the stories of its marginalised people' - Alan Franks, The Times. 'Porteous is a highly sophisticated writer, which is what carries her work beyond folkloric nostalgia. To be as alert to tradition as she is requires her to be, paradoxically, utterly modern; which in turn, given her talents (in particular, very few poets can match her ear), makes her an important poet not just regionally but as an advocate of her adopted language to a larger literary readership' - Sean O'Brien, Northern Review. 'History as lifeblood - not as ghosts, but as part of the earth and of us' - Julia Copus. 'Katrina Porteous - celebrates what springs up, unbeautiful, between the cracks left by the post-industrial landscapes of the Northeast, celebrates the endurance of rocks and plant life...and implicitly, too, the survival of human beings as cultures and traditions struggle with change' - Pippa Little, Writing Women. 'She writes a kind of poetry that is regrettably becoming rare, a poetry with accurately observed natural furnishings, a freshness and clarity of language, each poem with its own tune' - Vernon Scannell, Daily Telegraph.
