Tees Valley Writers

Katharine Banner

Katharine Banner is a poet who worked for some years on a dairy farm near Darlington and is now busy with a young son. She read psychology at York University and graduated in 1985. Her first published poem appeared in The Page - a former literary supplement of The Northern Echo - in 1993 and subsequently she has been published in magazines such as The Penniless Press, The North, Leviathan Quarterly, The New Writer and The Farmers' Weekly. She has read at a number of venues in the north east, including The Blue Room in Newcastle and the Georgian Theatre in Richmond.

During the Foot and Mouth outbreak of 2001 she recorded a poem on the theme of agricultural accidents for BBC News Online. Set against a backdrop of images of the epidemic, it was used to mark World Poetry Day. Much of her earlier work related to her farming experiences or had a rural setting, but she now finds poems in diverse locations: from a Walsall cemetery to a Las Vegas card room.

In 2001 Mudfog published her first pamphlet, Blowing May-laid Eggs in November and they followed this with a full-length collection in 2003: Aerial Photography.