Catherine Swire

ARTIST AND WRITER

Catherine is an artist and writer with an interest in landscape and animals. Her collection of poems, Soil, illustrated by Marina Kolchanova and published by the Artel Press, explores through a series of eight walks the way that human trauma is translated by landscape. Now in their third edition, her poems were featured on Radio 4’s Ramblings and at Ledbury Poetry Festival. She has led poetry workshops inspired by these poems from the Highlands to Kent. Drawings by Bridget Macdonald responding to Catherine’s work with landscape, have been exhibited widely including at Worcester Cathedral and Ledbury Poetry House.

Catherine’s prize winning book of prose and poetry, Flame, Ash, Feather, published by Black Spring Press, in March 2024, looks at the way violence is mediated by birds. Catherine has written on her work in publications including the Big Issue and the Telegraph. Two interviews exploring this work in more detail can be viewed via these links:

https://www.bigissue.com/opinion/catherine-swire-chicken-flame-ash-feather-grief-loss-trauma/

https://blackspringpressgroup.com/blogs/author-q-as/catherine-swire

Catherine’s forthcoming fiction Air Loom will be published at the end of 2025. Her book will explore the way our experience of time and belonging is transformed by landscape and weather.

Catherine spends time in Malvern and the North West of Skye. She studied literature at Oxford and went on to postgraduate study in Toronto with an interest in Medieval Poetry.

If you would like to contact Catherine you can email her on contact@catherineswire.com.

Links to her current books are given below:

https://blackspringpressgroup.com/products/flame-ash-feather

https://www.theartelpress.co.uk/shop/poetry/soil/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0014xtw