Katrina Porteous has lived in the Northumberland village of Beadnell for the past thirty years, formerly home to a centuries-old fishing community. Half the poems in The Lost Music celebrate her love of the place and its people. Her first collection also includes some of her own drawings featuring both fishing and industry in decline as well the wildlife of North-East England.
All her poems are strongly physical in character, written to be read aloud. They take as their starting-point the tensions between time and eternity, change and stillness. In language which is both passionate and controlled, they express the endless struggle to discover new forms of order.
The fishing poems develop these themes within a microcosm of the wider world. In a dialogue between her own voice and the fishermen's dialect, Katrina Porteous traces the identity of the community in its common memory and working practices, finding with the passing of the old ways of life a loss of spiritual direction. The poems suggest the way forward is neither to cling to the past nor to abandon it, but to change and remember.
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 she has also written in prose. Katrina often writes in Northumbrian dialect, as in The Wund an’ the Wetter, recorded on CD with piper Chris Ormston (Iron Press, 1999). She is President of the Northumbrian Language Society and the Coble and Keelboat Society. Her second collection from Bloodaxe, Two Countries (2014), was shortlisted for the Portico Prize for Literature in 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. Katrina often performs with musicians, including Chris Ormston, Alistair Anderson and Alexis Bennett.
Katrina is particularly known for her radio-poetry, much of it produced by Julian May. A new version of one of these poems, The Refuge Box, forms part of a permanent installation in Lindisfarne Priory Museum, alongside work by Olivia Lomenech Gill. Another, Horse, with electronic music by Peter Zinovieff, is published as an artists’ book and CD, with prints by Lomenech Gill (Windmillsteads Books, 2014).
Katrina’s third full-length collection, Edge (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), draws on three collaborations performed in Life Science Centre Planetarium, Newcastle, between 2013 and 2016, with multi-channel electronic music by Zinovieff: Field, Sun and Edge. Edge was broadcast as a Poetry Please Special on BBC Radio 4 in 2013.
In 2021 Katrina received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. Her final collaboration with Zinovieff was Under the Ice (2021). Her work has been set by Kristina Arakelyan for the BBC Proms (Whin Lands, 2023). Katrina’s fourth poetry book from Bloodaxe, Rhizodont, was published in June 2024 and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2024.
