Two Countries

Shortlisted for the Portico Prize for Literature 2015

Two Countries is a book of poems about place: about landscape, community, and the shifting, provisional relations between them. Born in Scotland, Katrina Porteous grew up in North-East England. These poems explore the ambiguities of borderlands, from the Roman Wall to the present-day Anglo-Scottish Border, and the ‘debatable lands’ between tradition and modernity, real and ideal, country and town, ‘nature’ and ‘culture’.

Katrina Porteous’s poetry reaches far beyond the local. Two Countries is organised around a selection of her radio work, poems of many voices, drawing on Border Ballad and Northumbrian story-telling and song, and often rooted in direct oral testimony. Among the most remarkable are the dialect voices of Northumbrian fishermen, and the words of hill farmers caught up in the 2001 foot-and-mouth epidemic.

Since her first collection, The Lost Music (1996), Katrina Porteous has collaborated widely with artists and musicians. Much of her work has been for BBC radio, notably with producer Julian May, who describes her as ‘extending the boundaries of the genre’.

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.