Katrina Porteous interviews & features for Rhizodont
'Katrina Porteous’s Rhizodont is a polyphonic hymn to England’s North-East coast ... it ranges nimbly across historical timescales and between Northumbrian dialect and scientific discourse. [...] Intimate and elegiac as a record of the recent past, Rhizodont is also a dazzling meditation on the relationship between man, nature, and machine.' – TS Eliot Prize 2024 Judges' comment
Katrina Porteous's fourth poetry collection, Rhizodont, was published by Bloodaxe in June 2024. It was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2024.
Rhizodont takes its name from the three-metre-long fossil fish found on the Northumberland coast in 2007, and moves from familiar places along the North-East coast to global questions of evolution, survival and extinction – in communities and languages, and in the natural world. Katrina launched her new book online with Bloodaxe Books on 26 June 2024. Scroll down for details of Bloodaxe's online reading and discussion event.
Rhizodont follows Katrina Porteous's third collection Edge (2019), which gathered together poems from her scientific collaborations. Her two earlier collections, The Lost Music (1996) and Two Countries (2014), were concerned with the landscapes and communities of North-East England. All four collections are published by Bloodaxe Books.
Poet and historian Katrina Porteous was born in Aberdeen, and grew up in County Durham. She has lived on the Northumberland coast since 1987. In 2021 Katrina received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. The Cholmondeley Awards recognise the achievement and distinction of individual poets.
Rhizodont is distributed in the US by Consortium Book Sales.
Katrina wrote a very touching piece for her blog ahead of the TS Eliot Prize Readings, which took place in London on Sunday 12 January 2025. Read Katrina's blog here.
'Rhizodont is named after a 330 million year old fossil fish; but it is about this moment, now – a moment of transition, from a carbon-based economy and an analogue world to a digital one. It asks questions about what we are doing to the planet, and about what technology is doing to us. We can’t know what the future holds. But this book places its faith in human imagination, and its twin offspring – scientific curiosity and poetic invention – to find brilliant ways ahead.' – Katrina Porteous
'Katrina Porteous’s Rhizodont 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, Rhizodont is also a dazzling meditation on the relationship between man, nature, and machine.' – TS Eliot Prize 2024 Judges' comment
REBROADCAST OF CONVERSATIONS ON A BENCH - KATRINA PORTEOUS
Poetry Extra: Conversations on a Bench: Northumberland - Katrina Porteous, BBC Radio 4 Extra, Sunday 19 February 2025, 7am, 12 noon & 6pm
To mark Katrina Porteous’s fourth collection Rhizodont having been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2024, Poetry Extra host Daljit Nagra chose an edition of the BBC Radio 4 series Conversations on a Bench featuring Katrina reading a long poem which she had written especially for the programme, and which is now included in Rhizodont.
Conversations on a Bench: Northumberland – Katrina Porteous was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in October 2016. This featured a new radio poem by Katrina Porteous which wove together the stories told to presenter Anna Scott-Brown on a bench overlooking Beadnell Harbour in Northumberland. This specially commissioned work by poet and Beadnell resident Katrina Porteous draws on the voices of locals and passers-by. Her poem evokes the cycles of seasons and millennia, the history locked within a disappearing dialect, and the constant reincarnation of communities, landscapes and ways of being.
A version of the poem, along with abbreviated extracts from the interviews, was subsequently published in Katrina’s collection Rhizodont as 'A Lang Way Hyem'.
Available on BBC Sounds until 18 February 2025. Katrina’s poem is woven through the programme. The original Radio 4 version is no longer available on BBC Sounds.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002749j
KATRINA PORTEOUS & HELEN FARISH ON THE VERB: THE TS ELIOT PRIZE READINGS
The Verb: TS Eliot Prize Readings, BBC Radio 4, Sunday 19 February 2025, 5.10pm
As in previous years, The Verb broadcast extracts from the TS Eliot Prize Readings, introduced by Verb presenter Ian McMillan, who also hosted the event at the Royal Festival Hall in London on 12 January.
Katrina Porteous and Helen Farish both gave excellent readings on the night from their shortlisted fourth collections Rhizodont and The Penny Dropping. The ‘two arresting poems’ by Helen Farish broadcast on The Verb were ‘‘Pretty Woman’’ and ‘Red Circle’. Recordings of Katrina reading her poems ‘#rhizodont’ and ‘Moon’ were included in the programme.
‘Ian McMillan presents highlights from the TS Eliot Prize Readings - extraordinary poetry from 2024.’
The programme will be available on BBC Sounds until 17:54 on 18 February 2025. Helen’s poems feature from 4:03 and Katrina’s from 12:06.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00274ny
BBC RADIO LONDON INTERVIEW WITH KATRINA PORTEOUS
Jumoké Fashola, BBC Radio London, Friday 10 January 2025, 2-5pm
Poet, historian and broadcaster Katrina Porteous was the Poetry Corner guest on the Jumoké Fashola show on 10 January ahead of the TS Eliot Prize Readings on 12 January. She was speaking down the line to Jumoké in great detail about her TS Eliot Prize-shortlisted fourth collection Rhizodont and concluded by reading the title poem ‘#rhizodont’. A fascinating sixteen-minute interview, which covered Katrina’s work with the fishing community of the Northumberland coast where she lives, her fascination with science – which has fed into her work in recent years – and the challenges facing us all with regard to climate change and other environmental issues.
‘The book is in some ways a snapshot of this moment in time … a snapshot that can be looked back at and say here are our challenges rights now, which is a wonderful thing I think for poetry and for science.’ – Jumoké Fashola, on Rhizodont
The programme will remain available on BBC Sounds until 6pm on 9 February. Katrina features from 1:16:07
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0kb28t0
LOCAL RADIO INTERVIEW WITH KATRINA PORTEOUS
Cambridge 105 Radio, Cambridge Arts Round-up, 26 December 2024
An in-depth interview with Katrina Porteous aired on Cambridge 105 Radio on 26 December in their Cambridge Arts Round-up feature. She was in conversation with host Simon Bertin, and spoke eloquently about her studies in Cambridge and the USA (including studying with Seamus Heaney at Harvard), her work with the fishing communities in North-East England, and her TS Eliot Prize-shortlisted fourth collection Rhizodont.
Katrina read her poems ‘Skylark’ from her debut collection The Lost Music and an extract from ‘The Wund an' the Wetter’ from Two Countries. She read and introduced ‘Antarctica Without Its Ice’ from the ‘Under the Ice’ sequence from Rhizodont, plus ‘#Rhizodont’ and ‘Sand Martins’ from the same collection.
‘Simon Bertin visits Katrina Porteous at Magdalene College whose new book Rhizodont is shortlisted for the T.S Eliot prize’
Katrina features first, introduced by Simon Bertin.
https://cambridge105.co.uk/arts-round-up-22-12-2024/
ONLINE REVIEW COVERAGE
DURA (Dundee University Review of the Arts), online 7 January 2025
An excellent review of Katrina Porteous’s fourth collection Rhizodont was featured online in DURA ahead of the announcement of the winner of the TS Eliot Prize 2024. Andy Jackson admires the ‘great sensitivity, erudition and flair’ with which she introduces readers to the themes she explores in the book.
https://dura-dundee.org.uk/2025/01/07/rhizodont/
TS Eliot Prize newsletter, 12 December 2024
Katrina Porteous was the Poet in Focus in the TS Eliot Prize e-newsletter of 12 December. This featured Readers' Notes and John Field’s wonderful review of her shortlisted collection Rhizodont, along with videos of Katrina reading three poems from the book and a separate video in which she talked about her work.
'Rhizodont, Porteous's fourth collection, is a hymn to the Earth, a love letter to the North East. The dialect of Northumberland washes it in a tide of language and, across these shifting sands of words, we step out of time and survey the planet from a geological perspective. The rhizodont of the title, a fossil fish which became extinct 310 million years ago, recalibrates our sense of time and reminds us that the Earth's cycles of erosion, extinction and creation transcend us. The result is a thrilling meeting of ideas and language as Porteous blurs the boundary between man and machine, between planet and technology.' – John Field, TS Eliot Prize reviewer
A link to the newsletter is here.
Katrina Porteous talks about her work
KATRINA PORTEOUS ON BACKLISTED
Backlisted podcast, Episode 228, 10 December 2024
Poet and historian Katrina Porteous was a guest on Episode 228 of the Backlisted podcast. She was discussing Voices of the Old Sea by Norman Lewis with fellow guest Patrick Galbraith and hosts John Mitchinson and Andy Miller. Katrina's four poetry books were mentioned in the introduction, the most recent of which is her TS Eliot Prize-shortlisted fourth collection Rhizodont, which host John Mitchinson called ‘a wonderful, wonderful collection’. He had previously recommended Rhizodont in an episode of the subscriber only podcast Locklisted.
From 10:12 Katrina spoke about living alongside and writing about the fishing community of Beadnell on the Northumberland coast, which led to her first collection The Lost Music. She found many parallels between her experience and that of the author Norman Lewis, who was writing about a fishing community in Spain. The episode notes linked to a page on Katrina’s website in which she writes about the poetry of fishing.
‘We are joined by the poet Katrina Porteous and the writer and editor Patrick Galbraith to discuss Norman Lewis’s account of the of the three summers he spent working in Farol, a remote fishing village on the Costa Brava in the late 1940s. His book records the intricacies of life in a small community whose rhythms are based on the shoals of sardines and tuna, and whose beliefs and rituals have remained unchanged for a thousand years. But change does arrive in the shape of a black marketeer who buys up two-thirds of the village and opens a garish tourist hotel. Within a year, the ancient Spain that Lewis loves begins to sink beneath the tidal wave of greed, commercialism and liberal attitudes that package holidays and unfettered tourism unleash. Lewis wrote his book thirty-five years after he’d lived in Farol. We are now 40 years on from its publication in 1984. Do his stories still resonate? We discuss why his sharply observed and artfully written books aren’t better known today, and put his writing in the context of the travel writing boom of the 1980s. Katrina also brings a fresh perspective to Lewis’ experience – she has lived in the fishing village of Beadnell on the Northumbrian cost for the past thirty years, where similar erosion of culture, language and tradition has taken place.’
https://www.backlisted.fm/episodes/228-voices-of-the-old-sea-by-norman-lewis
TS ELIOT PRIZE PUBLICITY FOR KATRINA PORTEOUS
Poetry School, TS Eliot Prize Writers’ Notes, online 2 December 2024
Katrina Porteous was invited to contribute a piece to the Poetry School’s TS Eliot Prize Writers’ Notes series. She focused on her fourth collection Rhizodont, which is shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2024.
‘The poems in Rhizodont touch on huge subjects – species loss, ecology, climate – but they do so through local places I know well. The rhythms of the Northumberland coast where I live – its seasons, tides, weather, as well as its speech – are vital to my work. Roots matter. But in an age of globalisation the meanings of place and community are shifting. Much new poetry is engaged with uprootedness: displacement, migration, interrupted city rhythms. I hinted at this difference in the title of an earlier collection, Two Countries. I strongly feel that we live in a palimpsest of both: dislocation and migration, belonging and inclusion – and that poetry is an excellent medium to embrace this complexity. The poems in Rhizodont are rooted in place, but provisionality and impermanence suffuse them.' – Katrina Porteous, TS Eliot Prize Writers' Notes, Poetry School
https://poetryschool.com/t-s-eliot-writers-notes/katrina-porteous-t-s-eliot-writers-notes/
Katrina Porteous will be the Poet in Focus in the TS Eliot Prize e-newsletter on 12 December, which will feature Readers' Notes and John Field’s review of Rhizodont, along with videos of Katrina reading from and talking about her work.
US PUBLICITY
Shepherd Books, Hugh Warwick: Top 3 Books of 2024, online November 2024
UK environmentalist and author Hugh Warwick chose Katrina Porteous’s fourth collection Rhizodont as one of his three favourite books of 2024 on the US books website Shepherd.com.
'...this is just stunning. Ideas cover time, deep time - and her deep connections to the place - her place in Northumberland on the north east coast of England. You do not need to know her home to become utterly absorbed in the stories she tells.' – Hugh Warwick (Top 3 Books), Shepherd Books, on Rhizodont
https://shepherd.com/bboy/2024/f/hugh-warwick
KATRINA PORTEOUS FEATURED ONLINE IN CULTURED. NORTH EAST
Cultured. North East, online 11 October 2024
David Whetstone has written a piece for Cultured. North East in response to the news that Katrina Porteous’s fourth collection Rhizodont has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2024. He had interviewed Katrina ahead of the book's publication for another regional online publication, The QT. The Cultured. North East piece features brief extracts from that interview. Katrina has lived on the Northumberland coast since 1987, and grew up in County Durham.
The piece also mentions Bloodaxe’s second TS Eliot Prize 2024 shortlisting for Cumbrian poet Helen Farish’s The Penny Dropping, and also celebrates Bloodaxe’s recent Forward Prize success with Marjorie Lotfi winning The Felix Prize for Best First Collection 2024 for her debut The Wrong Person to Ask.
https://www.culturednortheast.co.uk/p/fossil-fish-collection-makes-poetry
INTERIVEW WITH KATRINA PORTEOUS
Interview with Katrina Porteous in North East Living, September 2024
Katrina Porteous was interviewed for the September 2024 issue of North East Living magazine. In the article, Katrina wrote about her new collection Rhizodont and its connection to the North-East coast. The article featured a stunning photograph taken by Katrina of a lagoon coloured by pit waste, and was accompanied by the poems 'Painted Ladies' and 'Speckled Wood' from Rhizodont.
The digital version of North East Living is available online as a flipbook. Sign up for free to see back issues: https://subscriber.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/subscribe.aspx?source=4&eid=0377dec1-eec7-4127-903c-1f4a24cc7326
ONLINE REVIEW COVERAGE
New Writing North, New & Recent Poetry from the North: Summer 2024, online 14 June 2024
Good reviews of new collections by Cumbrian poet Helen Farish and Northumberland’s Katrina Porteous were included in Will Mackie’s Summer 2024 New and Recent Poetry from the North feature, which went online on the New Writing North website on 14 June.
‘Rhizodont is the new book from Katrina Porteous. This detailed and wide-ranging collection, while rooted in the North East, explores global landscapes and themes of ecology and community.’ – Will Mackie, New & Recent Poetry from the North: Summer 2024
https://newwritingnorth.com/journal/new-and-recent-poetry-from-the-north-summer-2024/
Write Out Loud, online Tuesday 25 June 2024
A review of Katrina Porteous’s fourth collection Rhizodont was featured in Write Out Loud following her in-person launch in Alnwick at Barter Books on 24 June, where Katrina was in conversation with Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. Greg Freeman was in the audience.
‘What are we doing to the planet? What is technology doing to us? These are the common themes, according to the poet herself, within the new collection of poetry by Katrina Porteous, who might well be described as the laureate of the Northumberland coast.’ – Greg Freeman, Write Out Loud
https://www.writeoutloud.net/public/blogentry.php?blogentryid=136023
A review of Katrina Porteous's reading in Wooler on 15 April 2023 is featured in Write Out Loud here. 'Under the Ice' was her fifth and final collaboration with the late composer Peter Zinovieff. The sequence is now published in her fourth collection Rhizodont (2024).
ONLINE INTERVIEW WITH KATRINA PORTEOUS
The QT, online Thursday 20 June 2024
An interview with Katrina Porteous went online in The QT on 20 June ahead of the launch of her fourth poetry collection Rhizodont at Barter Books in Alnwick on Monday 24 June 2024.
‘Poet Katrina Porteous explains the concerns underpinning her new collection, Rhizodont, to David Whetstone’. The article is subscriber only.
https://theqt.online/poetic-rebirth-for-prehistoric-predator/
TWO ONLINE INTERVIEWS WITH KATRINA PORTEOUS IN THE FRIDAY POEM
The Friday Poem, online Friday 1 September 2023 and Friday 7 June 2024
An interview with Katrina Porteous went online in The Friday Poem on 1 September 2023. She was speaking to Rowan Bell about her forthcoming collection Rhizodont, which is published by Bloodaxe in June 2024, and about the fishing community on the Northumberland coast. The piece is illustrated with several photographs of Katrina taken with the fishermen about whom she has written in her first two collections The Lost Music (1996) and Two Countries (2014).
https://thefridaypoem.com/a-curlew-flings-its-loop-of-sound/
'Rhizodont is about survival and extinction within cultures, communities and languages, as well as in the natural world.' – Rowan Bell, The Friday Poem
A follow-up interview in TFP was published online on 7 June 2024 to mark the book's publication. Rowan Bell was talking to Katrina Porteous about the power of dialect words, and about writing for radio. Read here.
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BBC RADIO 4 FEATURE WITH POEMS BY KATRINA PORTEOUS
The Susurrations of the Sea, BBC Radio 4, Thursday 15 December 2022, 11.30am
Poet Katrina Porteous wrote a new sequence of poems especially for this stunning BBC Radio 4 feature broadcast on 15 December. The programme interwove Katrina's poems with sounds of the sea, reflections of those who listen to them intently - including a visually impaired surfer and a herring fisherman - and with extracts from Benjamin Britten's Four Sea Interludes from his opera Peter Grimes. The programme is a collaboration between Katrina Porteous and BBC Radio producer Julian May. The poems responding to the sounds of the sea are now published in her fourth collection Rhizodont (on pages 13, 14, 53, 96-7 and 112).
‘The Susurrations of the Sea is a collaboration between the poet Katrina Porteous, who lives right next to the North Sea in Beadnell, Northumberland; radio producer Julian May, who grew up close to the Atlantic in Cornwall; and with the sea itself. They gather the variety of its sounds, from gentle susurrations as the tide moves over mud, to the steady roar of surf and mighty waves crashing onto rocks. They weave these with the words of people who, more than most of us, listen to these sounds. Melissa Reid is a visually impaired competitive surfer at Porthtowan in Cornwall. The writer Lara Messersmith-Glavin grew up on a salmon seiner, fishing out of Kodiak Island, Alaska. Lara recalls how the sounds of the sea brought fear as well the comfort. David Woolf, in Orkney, who works on wave energy projects, tells the life story of a wave, and considers the role of the oceans in the climate crisis. Stephen Perham, rowing his picarooner out of Clovelly harbour, shows how, when fishing for herring without an engine or any modern equipment, learning the sounds of the sea is essential.
The susurrations of the sea are culturally important, finding their way into language and music. At his piano the musician Martin Pacey illustrates how Benjamin Britten captures these in his Sea Interludes, and how these reflect mood and character. For Stephen and Katrina the words people use to describe that sea are themselves sea susurrations. Katrina writes a new sequence of poems in response to the sounds of the sea and these run through the programme like breaking waves, a choppy sea and an ocean swell.’
The programme was one of the Radio Times's Today's Choices for 15 December 2022.
Listen via BBC Sounds here.
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INTERVIEW WITH KATRINA PORTEOUS ON RADIO 4's OPEN COUNTRY – A BBC RADIO 4 PICK OF THE WEEK
Open Country: The Bord Waalk of Amble, BBC Radio 4, Thursday 29 October 2020, 3pm (repeated Saturday 31 October, 6.07 am)
Poet and historian Katrina Porteous was interviewed for this programme about a new bird sculpture trail from Low Hauxley to Warkworth on the Northumberland coast where she lives. Featuring interviews with Amble residents and new poetry for the walking trail app from Katrina Porteous. This sequence of bird poems is now published in her fourth collection Rhizodont.
Katrina’s interview was used at the beginning and end of the programme, as well as several times in between. She read her new poems ‘Sand Martins’ and ‘Cubby’ (about eiderducks) – written especially for the walking trail app – which were later published in Rhizodont. She spoke about how her residency at the school at Amble had led her to meet the fishermen there, which in turn prompted her to start writing about the fishing community in her debut collection The Lost Music (1996).
Katrina features at the very beginning, then at 11:20, 15:58, 17:33 and 22:53. Listen via BBC Sounds here.
Katrina's reading of her new poem 'Cubby' on Open Country was chosen for Radio 4's Pick of the Week on 1 November 2020.
JOINT ONLINE LAUNCH EVENT FOR RHIZODONT
Online launch reading by Matt Howard and Katrina Porteous
This online launch reading by Matt Howard and Katrina Porteous, celebrating the publication of their new poetry collections, was livestreamed on 26 June 2024 and is now available on YouTube. They read from their new collections and discussed them with each other and with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. A fascinating discussion about writing about the natural world and rural communities. Katrina read first in each set. The readings were followed by the discussion.
[07 June 2024]
