Hi, I’m Katie. Although I primarily call myself a writer, I have my finger in a lot of arts-related pies: poet / novelist / lyricist / blogger / arts administrator / workshop leader / project manager / Arts Award adviser / chat show host / occasional frontwoman of a guerrilla poetry mission.
Check out my projects, or my full list of publications, prizes, residencies & commissions.
Represented by: Lucy Luck at Conville + Walsh
If you’re looking for a bio and/or photos to use for an event, please use the ones below.
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50 word bio:
Katie Hale won a Northern Debut Award for her poetry collection, White Ghosts, and is the author of a novel, My Name is Monster, and two poetry pamphlets. She is a MacDowell Fellow, and winner of the Gulliver Travel Grant, Palette Poetry Prize, and Northern Writers’ Award.
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100 word bio:
Katie Hale won a Northern Debut Award for her poetry collection, White Ghosts, and is the author of a novel, My Name is Monster, and two poetry pamphlets. She is a former MacDowell Fellow, and winner of the Palette Poetry Prize, Munster Chapbook Prize, and Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize. Her short fiction has been longlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. Katie also runs Dove Cottage Young Poets for Wordsworth Grasmere, and is a Core Team Member of the Writing Squad. Her second novel, The Edge of Solitude, is published by Canongate in July 2024.
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The full story:
Based in Cumbria, Katie Hale is an internationally recognised novelist & poet, with over a decade’s experience of leading and facilitating creative programmes.
Her debut poetry collection, White Ghosts – for which she was awarded an Arts Council England DYCP grant in 2019, and a Northern Debut Award for Poetry in 2021 – was published by Nine Arches in March 2023. Her debut novel, My Name is Monster (Canongate, 2019), was published following Penguin Random House’s inaugural WriteNow mentoring scheme, and has since been translated into German and Italian, She has published two poetry pamphlets: Breaking the Surface (flipped eye, 2017), and Assembly Instructions (Southword, 2019), which won the Munster Chapbook Prize.
A 2019 MacDowell Fellow and winner of the 2022 Speculative Literature Foundation Gulliver Travel Grant, her Writer in Residence positions have included: Gladstone’s Library (Wales), Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), Passa Porta (Belgium), the Wordsworth Trust (England), Heinrich Böll Cottage (Ireland), a MacDowell Fellowship (USA), and the Writers’ House of Georgia (Georgia).
Other recent awards for her poetry have included the Palette Poetry Prize, the Prole Laureate Competition, and the Jane Martin Prize. She was also runner up in the 2019 Mslexia Poetry Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Aesthetica Poetry Prize, the University of Canberra Vice Chancellor’s Poetry Prize, and twice for the Manchester International Poetry Prize. Her poetry has been published in journals including Mslexia, The North, Poetry Review, Magma, bath magg and Under the Radar – and featured in anthologies from Broken Sleep, Saraband and Handstand Press.
Her fiction has appeared in Joyland, Hotel, and Under the Radar, and in 2021 she was awarded the Georgia Writers’ House Prize. She has been shortlisted for the Desperate Literature Prize and the Bath Flash Fiction Award, and longlisted for the Exeter Story Prize, the Galley Beggar Press Prize, and the BBC National Short Story Award. In 2022, she won the Northern Writers’ Award for Fiction to work on her second novel – for which she has also been awarded an Authors’ Foundation Grant and the Gulliver Travel Grant.
She has also written for radio, theatre and immersive digital performance – most recently a commission for Ragged Edge Theatre Company, incorporating poetry into a community-driven audio adventure. During lockdown in 2020, she was lead writer on Bella: a site-specific interactive piece of outdoor theatre, produced by Eden Arts and delivered through QR codes at historic locations around Penrith, Cumbria. In 2018, she created a Guerrilla Poetry programme for Kendal Poetry Festival, which has since expanded, and in 2021, became the central physical aspect of an otherwise digital festival. In 2022, she took on the additional role of Festival Coordinator for Kendal Poetry Festival’s first hybrid year.
She has written collaboratively as a lyricist, working with composer Stephen Hyde to create a chamber musical, The Inevitable Quiet of the Crash, which premiered at Edinburgh Fringe in 2017 – and to write songs which have featured in a number of productions by touring theatre company The Three Inch Fools. In 2019, she also worked with international theatre company Théâtre Volière to create a collaborative folk opera, inspired by the history of women in and around Gretna.
Her work for radio has included appearances on BBC Radio 4’s Open Book, Front Row, and Contains Strong Language. In 2022, she was a guest presenter on BBC Live Lessons’ National Poetry Day special on CBBC, and in 2021 was guest poet on Rosie Jones’ Trip Hazard (Channel 4). In 2019, she wrote and presented the Cumbria episode of Tongue and Talk: The Dialect Poets, produced by Made in Manchester for Radio 4.
Her work has been commissioned by organisations including BBC Radio 4 and BBC Local Radio, National Poetry Day, the Barbican Centre, the National Trust, Passa Porta and Creative Tourist. She has worked as a project officer and administrator for Cumbrian arts organisations including Eden Arts, Prism Arts and the Brewery Arts Centre, and has also worked as a travel feature writer and blogger, collaborating with organisations across the UK, Iceland and Vietnam.
She regularly appears at festivals, both in person and online, and delivers creative workshops for adults and in schools. She runs Dove Cottage Young Poets – a fortnightly young writers’ group for Wordsworth Grasmere – and is a Core Team Member of the Writing Squad, mentoring young prose writers on a one-to-one basis. In recent years, she has facilitated creative workshops for organisations such as the Wordsworth Trust, New Writing North and the Barbican Centre, as well as running her own workshop and event series via Zoom.
Katie Hale 
