Catherine Czerkawska is an extensively published and award-winning writer of fiction (novels and short stories) non-fiction and plays for theatre, BBC radio and television.

 

Born in Yorkshire, of Polish and Irish parentage, she has spent most of her life in Scotland, with time also spent working in Finland, Poland and the Canaries.

 

Her historical novels include The Physic Garden, set in early nineteenth-century Glasgow and The Jewel, about the life and times of Robert Burns’s wife, Jean Armour, both published by Saraband.

 

In 2019 Contraband published A Proper Person to be Detained, a personal family story that takes us from Ireland to the industrial heartlands of England and Scotland, giving voice to people often maligned by society and silenced by history – immigrants, women, the working classes.

 

Her stage plays include two full length plays commissioned by Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre: Wormwood, a full-length play about the Chernobyl disaster staged in 1997 and Quartz. She has written three plays for Glasgow Oran Mor, as well as various community theatre projects, television drama and more than 100 hours of drama for BBC R4.

 

Her other interests include antique textiles, local and social history. She has served on the committee of the Society of Authors in Scotland and spent four years as Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the University of the West of Scotland.