Katrina Porteous is an award-winning poet who has lived at Beadnell in Northumberland since 1987. She was born in Aberdeen, grew up in County Durham, read history at Cambridge and went on to study in the US on a Harkness Fellowship. A Gregory Award winner in 1989, she has since won writers' bursaries from the Arts Council, Northern Arts and the Society of Authors, and this year, 2003, she has been awarded an Arts Foundation Award in Poetry.

Many of the poems in Katrina's first collection, The Lost Music (Bloodaxe, 1996), are concerned with her local fishing community. More recent work is included in Turning the Tide, a collaboration with an artist and a photographer chronicling the regeneration of the black beaches of East Durham.

Katrina has worked on collaborations with many other artists, including public art for Seaham, County Durham with sculptor Michael Johnson, and a CD of her long poem in Northumbrian dialect, The Wund an' the Wetter, with piper Chris Ormston (Iron Press, 1999). In 2000 she worked with composer Alistair Anderson on the millennium musical Tam Lin and collaborated on a poem-film for Poetry International.

Katrina's particular interests include sound-poems for radio - she has written five in the last two years for BBC Radio 3 and 4, including contributions to Poetry Proms, National Poetry Day and The Verb. These have been described as 'extending the boundaries of the genre'. Her piece inspired by Dunstanburgh Castle will be broadcast on Radio 4 on 9 February 2004 at 8.30pm.

Katrina's public work includes 15 years' experience of leading school and adult poetry workshops from keystage 1 to sixth form, university, WEA, and the elderly. She has been poet-in-residence in a wide range of settings, from inner-city schools in Boston, USA, to the Shetland Islands and King's College School, Cambridge. Last autumn (2002) she was writer-in-residence at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival.

Her oral history of north Northumberland fishing communities, The Bonny Fisher Lad, is now available. The six north Northumbrian villages of Holy Island, Seahouses, Beadnell, Newton-by-the Sea, Craster and Boulmer all grew up around one industry: fishing. The Bonny Fisher Lad contains the testimony of some of the men and women whose way of life, passed down the generations, gave these coastal villages their unique identity. In their own words and pictures, it follows their hardships, and celebrates their skills and their indomitable sense of community, from the sailing days to the present. In so doing, it bears witness to changes which have led to the current crisis in the industry, which in turn threatens to transform the character of these villages altogether.

The Bonny Fisher Lad costs £9.99 and is available from bookshops now. Copies are also available post free from the publisher, The People's History: Suite 1 Byron House, Seaham Grange Business Park, Co. Durham SR7 0PY (tel 0191 523 5111).

Katrina is currently working on a new poetry collection for Bloodaxe.