Catherine Czerkawska

Catherine Lucy Czerkawska, (born 3 December 1950) is a Scottish-based novelist and playwright. She has written many plays for the stage and for BBC Radio 4 and has published numerous novels and short stories. Wormwood – about the Chernobyl disaster – was produced at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre in 1997, while her novel The Curiosity Cabinet was shortlisted for the Dundee Book Prize in 2005.

Born in Leeds, Yorkshire, to Julian Czerkawski and Kathleen Sunter, she attended Holy Family Primary School and Notre Dame Grammar School. The family moved to Ayrshire, Scotland, in 1962 where she attended Queen Margaret Academy in Ayr. After graduating from Edinburgh University with an honours degree in English Language and Literature with Mediaeval Studies, got a master's degree in Folk Life Studies at the University of Leeds. Her research dissertation on fishing traditions in South Ayrshire was the basis for her study Fisherfolk of Carrick, published in 1976, a work in which she commented on social relations and the role of women in that community:

Fishing marriages have a long history of partnership, with the wife not only keeping house for her husband but actively participating in his work. When we hear of wives carrying husbands on their backs through the shallows to the boat, as happened in the old days, it isn't really an example of outrageous masculine superiority! It was simply much more practical for the woman to go back and dry herself beside her own fire (her house would be close beside the beach anyway) than for her husband to spend uncomfortable hours in a boat which would be quite damp enough anyway!

She taught English as a foreign language in Tampere, Finland for two years and at Wroclaw University, drawing on her Polish connections, (sponsored by the British Council) for a further year. On her return she took up a position as Community Writer with the Arts in Fife, based in Cupar and thereafter became a full-time freelance writer.

Czerkawska began her writing life as a poet and radio playwright in Edinburgh. Her first collection of poems, White Boats, was a joint venture with Andrew Greig, published by Garret Arts in 1973. Her first solo collection, A Book of Men, was published by Akros in 1976 and won a Scottish Arts Council New Writing Award.^{[citation needed]} Her first radio play, The Hare and the Fox, was broadcast around this time and she went on to write more than 100 hours of drama for BBC Radio 4.^{[citation needed]}

She wrote numerous original plays, starting with Heroes and Others (1980), for the Scottish Theatre Company. O Flower of Scotland won a Pye Award for Best Original Drama 1980, while Bonnie Blue Hen won a Scottish Radio Industries Club Award for Best Production of 1982.^{[citation needed]} She gained prominence in the next decade, when her 1997 play Wormwood (an ecologically themed play about the Chernobyl disaster) was produced by Traverse Theatre.

Through the 1980s and 90s she continued to write successfully for radio and for television including a six-part series for STV, called Shadow of the Stone, starring Alan Cumming and Shirley Henderson.

She worked for several years with artistic director John Murtagh on Borderline Theatre's community projects, including The Devil and Mary Lamont/Bonnie Blue Hen, 1995), . She was also commissioned to write audio material for the National Trust for Scotland, for Falkland Palace, Bannockburn and Culross in Fife. Her first published novel was the book of the television series, Shadow of the Stone. This was followed by The Golden Apple, written while she and her husband were living and working aboard a 50-foot catamaran in the Canary Isles. The novel is largely set on the Canarian island of La Gomera.