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Strange Roof is a bold collection that shines a light on women as immigrants, emigrants, mothers, daughters, wives and artists. The poems are fresh; searingly honest, sharp, poignant and accessible.
About the author
Catherine Higgins-Moore is a Northern Irish writer based in New York. She writes for The Times Literary Supplement and is founding editor of The Irish Literary Review. Catherine has worked in the newsrooms of BBC Belfast and BBC Oxford. She holds Master's degrees from Trinity College Dublin and the University of Oxford.
In 2016 Catherine was shortlisted for a Pen Parentis Fellowship, the Ted Hughes Elmet Trust Award, and the Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year. In both 2014 and 2015 Catherine was shortlisted for the HG Wells Grand Prize. Also in 2015, she was nominated for Oxford Brookes International Poetry Award. In 2014 she was shortlisted for Cambridge University's Jane Martin Girton College Poetry Prize. Catherine's short fiction has been nominated for the Bath Short Story Prize and The Asham Award.
Her writing has been published in The Stinging Fly, The Gathering, Embers of Words: An Irish Anthology of Migrant Poetry, in American journal Northern Liberties Review, alongside writers Maya Angelou, Seamus Heaney, John Betjeman and Bob Dylan in Heart Shoots, The Cherwell, The Honest Ulsterman and Prole.
Catherine's play Just Two People was produced at The Oxford Playhouse's Burton Taylor Studio in November 2010. She was offered one of eight places on Columbia University's M.F.A in Playwriting. Columbia's Course Director, Playwright Charles Mee, said of the 2008 intake:
"We admitted a class of unusually bright, talented, interesting, surprising, risk-taking students, and, among them, Catherine is a standout. She is a remarkably smart, gifted, adventurous writer. [Her] work... is outstanding-strikingly original and fresh, beautifully crafted, startlingly accomplished."
Catherine has been awarded bursaries by Kenneth Branagh, and the Mawby Foundation at Kellogg College, Oxford.
