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We are incredibly proud to have Katrina Porteous as Author-in-Residence at Kielder Primary School and Nursery.
At Kielder, we want children to understand that reading and writing are not simply things we do in lessons: they are ways of exploring ideas, expressing ourselves, understanding where we come from and making sense of the world around us. Our relationship with a professional writer gives our children a unique opportunity to see this in action.
Katrina Porteous is an award-winning poet whose work is deeply rooted in the landscapes, communities, language and ecology of Northumberland. Born in Scotland, she has lived on the Northumberland coast for almost 40 years, and much of her writing explores the lives and heritage of the people who live here, particularly fishing communities. She is also a local historian and has written extensively for radio and performance, often in collaboration with musicians. Her words were set for the BBC Proms in 2023.
Katrina's writing takes many different forms, from poetry written in Northumbrian dialect to audio-visual performances created for a planetarium. She is President of the Northumbrian Language Society and has a long history of working creatively with children and schools.
She has published four poetry collections with Bloodaxe Books. Her most recent collection, Rhizodont (2024), was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and won the Laurel Prize for environmental poetry in 2025.
Having an Author-in-Residence gives our children something particularly special: an ongoing relationship with a real writer.
Rather than experiencing an author visit as a one-off event, pupils have opportunities to work with Katrina over time – listening, talking, questioning, exploring language and creating writing of their own. Children can experience first-hand how writers develop ideas, make choices, respond to places and experiences, and refine their work.
This helps us to develop children who see themselves not simply as pupils completing a piece of writing, but as readers, writers, speakers and thinkers with something worth saying.
Katrina's work has a particularly strong connection with our school because of its relationship with Northumberland, its landscapes, communities, ecology and heritage.
As England's most remote primary school, the place in which we live and learn is an important part of our identity. Through our Author-in-Residence work, children are encouraged to notice the landscape around them, listen to the stories of their community and recognise that their own experiences and voices are worthy of literature.
The children learn that extraordinary writing does not only come from distant places: it can begin with the forest outside the classroom, the reservoir, a family story, a remembered word, a sound, an observation or a question.
Our Author-in-Residence programme forms part of our wider commitment to developing confident communicators.
Working alongside Katrina supports children to:
encounter ambitious, beautiful and sometimes challenging language;
talk about texts, ideas, places and experiences;
experiment with vocabulary and the sounds and rhythms of language;
develop confidence in sharing their own ideas;
understand writing as a process of thinking, drafting and refining;
make connections between literature, history, nature, science, music and the arts;
recognise the importance of local voices, dialect and cultural heritage; and
develop their own identities as writers.
It complements our whole-school approach to reading, writing and oracy and reflects a principle that sits at the heart of our work:
Every Voice Matters. Every Writer Grows.
For a very small, rural school, experiences like these matter enormously.
Our children deserve access to artists, writers, musicians and thinkers of the highest calibre. Having an award-winning poet working with our school enables children to encounter professional creativity at close quarters and demonstrates that geography should never limit opportunity or ambition.
Above all, we hope our work with Katrina helps every child to understand that their place has stories worth telling, their experiences are worth writing about and their voice deserves to be heard.