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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 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, 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. Her fourth poetry book from Bloodaxe, Rhizodont, will be published in June 2024.<p>Katrina Porteous has always kept faith with the North East, where times of transition are intensly played out in the post-industrial landscapes. She refuses to ignore local language either, offering work adept in Northumbrian dialect, modern English, and the argot of science. <em>Rhizodont </em>considers deep time, extractive industry, alienation, and the efforts of communities to survive with integrity, and, in a crucial act of imagination, she speaks as other non-human entities, an ice-core, a redshank. We were impressed by the way her attention to the small and local belied the sweep and depth of her project. Rhizodont displays modern lyricism by a senior poet, loving, knowing, and authoritative.</p>
- Kathleen Jamie, Chair of The Laurel Prize 2025 Judges
<p>Katrina Porteous’s <em>Rhizodont</em> is a polyphonic hymn to England’s North-East coast, burrowing in ‘ware stink / and salty tangle’ as it ranges nimbly across historical timescales and between Northumbrian dialect and scientific discourse. Contemporary dog walkers inhabit the same space as sooty collieries and Scotch gutters; in turn, the recent industrial past fades into the sound of the waves, a blackbird with soil on his whiskers, and the longer and stranger movements of geological time, when Northumberland was a tropical swamp and huge freshwater fish began hauling themselves onto land. Intimate and elegiac as a record of the recent past, <em>Rhizodont</em> is also a dazzling meditation on the relationship between man, nature, and machine.</p>
- Mimi Khalvati, Anthony Joseph and Hannah Sullivan, T.S. Eliot Prize 2024 Judges
Winner of The Laurel Prize 2025
330 million years ago what is now the rocky shore close to Katrina Porteous’s Northumberland home was a tropical swamp inhabited by three-metre long predatory fish with huge tusk-like teeth. They belonged to a family of lobe-finned fishes which evolved to move on land as well as swim, and which are the ancestors of all four-limbed vertebrates, including humans. The fossil fish found in Northumberland is called the ‘rhizodont’.
Porteous’s new collection begins with a lovingly-observed contemporary journey through these ancient landscapes, from the former coal-mining communities of the Durham coast, where the coal-bearing Carboniferous strata are overlain with younger rocks, to the Northumberland shores where the rhizodont’s remains were found. Against a backdrop of vast geological time and recent fossil-fuel burning history, these poems address current issues of social and environmental change. They are followed by two sequences about aspects of the latest technological revolution – autonomous systems and AI, and the remote-sensing techniques used to explore the most inaccessible reaches of our planet, Antarctica, to measure Earth’s changing climate.
The poems unfold from England’s North-East coast into global questions of evolution, survival and extinction – in communities and languages, and throughout the natural world, where hope resides in Life’s astonishing powers of reinvention.
Rhizodont is Katrina Porteous's fourth poetry collection from Bloodaxe, and extends territory explored in her three previous books. It combines scientific themes from Edge (2019) with the ecological localism of Two Countries (2014) and The Lost Music (1996), both of which were concerned with the landscapes and communities of North-East England. Rhizodont won The Laurel Prize 2025 and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2024.