Durre Shahwar is a writer, researcher, editor, and an artist with a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from Cardiff University. She is an Associate Fellow of Higher Education and teaches and facilitates creative writing and literature seminars and workshops. Durre’s PhD was funded by South West and Wales, Doctoral Training Partnership (AHRC) and looked at the nuances and misconceptions of autofiction and how it might be used to write about hybrid identities, particularly from a Welsh-Pakistani perspective. Her writing is rooted in exploring how decolonised creative practices and methodologies can create space for marginalised narratives. She is currently working on her first book, a sample of which was shortlisted and highly commended for the Morley Lit Prize.

Durre is the co-editor of Gathering, an essay anthology on nature, climate, the landscape by women of colour (2024, 404 Ink). She is the Deputy Editor of Wasafiri Magazine, where she was previously a Writer-in-Residence. She was also a Writer-in-Residence for Literature Wales’ ‘Natur a Ni’ project, facilitating community workshops to explore how marginalised communities form connections with nature. Between 2022-2023, Durre was the recipient of a Future Wales Fellowship, undertaking a year of creative research around climate justice and art, accumulating in a group exhibition at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery.

Established in 2017, Durre is the co-founder of ‘Where I’m Coming From’, the first community open mic collective for writers of colour in Wales. Actively involved in community projects, Durre has worked with Cardiff's numerous grassroots groups.

Durre’s written work overlaps the boundaries between non-fiction, essay, autofiction, short story, prose poetry, and has been published widely, most prominently: Wasafiri, Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class (Dead Ink Books), We Shall Fight Until We Win (404 Ink), Welsh (Plural) (Repeater Books), Homes for Heroes 100: Council Estate Memories (Bristol Festival of Ideas), Artes Mundi, Sister-hood Magazine, Visual Verse, Azeema Mag, Poetry Wales. Her short play 'On My Terms' was performed at Edinburgh Fringe.

In the past, she has received a Writers’ Bursary from Literature Wales, has been a part of Hay Festival Writers at Work, BBC Writersroom Wales, Artist in Residence at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, and a Located Residency Artist with National Theatre Wales. Her visual work was also part of G39’s ‘We Ran Together’ exhibition 2024.

Various events that she’s been a part of include festivals such as Hay Festival, Migration Matters Festival, Bradford Literature Festival, Liverpool Literary Festival, Green Man Festival, as well as readings at numerous bookshops across the UK, reading groups, panels and workshops.

Research and Writing Interests: nature writing, language, autofiction, decolonisation, intersectionality, class, migration, mental health, ekphrastic writing, memory, climate change

 

“Traditional narratives of how we approach nature have also been shaped by ideas of ‘conquering’ or ‘overcoming’ nature and the unknown that also shaped my relationship to it….of pushing hard and beyond my limits because I didn’t want to be held back by my class, gender, background, skin colour, mental health. Everyday metaphors of ‘moving mountains’ and ‘climbing mountains’ that create measurements of our effort and success also fed into this narrative…they still speak to an ableist and colonialist way of approaching the landscape.”


Co-edited by Durre, Gathering brings together essays by women of colour across the UK writing about their relationships with nature, in a genre long-dominated by male, white, middle-class writers. In redressing this imbalance, this moving collection considers climate justice, neurodiversity, mental health, academia, inherited histories, colonialism, whiteness, music, hiking and more. These personal, creative, and fierce essays will broaden both conversations and horizons about our living world, encouraging readers to consider their own experience with nature and their place within it.

Gathering: Women of Colour on Nature (2024)

Read some of Durre’s work

“Different languages are different perspectives on our shared world, formed by our experience of it. It is impossible and limiting to mirror word-for-word. The gaps, the spaces that can’t be filled by literal translation are bridged by a spiderweb, network of language and associations...”

Writing Myself Down: The Language of Autofiction

“Autofiction, as I see it, stems from an existential desire to understand and make sense of our lives by allowing language and the imagination take control of the narrative of what has happened to us. Through it, we regain autonomy; through it, we can imagine better for ourselves, and use the personal to turn towards something that goes beyond us…”

Autofiction and Emotional Truth

“You see, the financial aspect of being working class is not as simplistic as having less 'stuff' or money, but also the barriers to skills, culture, and arts that a lack of money creates.”

‘Navigating Space’, Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class

“A sense of place identity is created through the multiple ways in which various places often make us feel a sense of belonging, create meaning, foster attachments or mediate change. The idea of attachment to a physical space in the natural world has become more prevalent than ever during the pandemic. Nature offers us a safe, welcoming and non-judgmental space in an increasingly unsafe world".”

Identity as Place, Welsh (Plural)

“The word ‘entanglement’ also reminds of the trickiness of navigating disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and academic language; words can have different meaning and associations according to who is using them, in what context they are said, and what their experience or assumption of the word is.”

Writing About Human Entanglement With the Land

“My grandmother’s house sits empty, while in the new country she grows Midas sunflowers that recline against the eastern wall, the surface lined with broken glass to deter birds from gorging on the raw seeds, circadian sunlight filtering  through the shards, tilting into the watchful eye she casts across the cornfields where my mother runs as a child, across the pock-marked land awaiting kernel, across the well filled with summer rain, to the horizon scanning for soldiers.

’47’

Gathering (film) 2022

A short, meditative and explorative piece of work created as the result of a Located Residency and Springboard project with National Theatre Wales that took place during lockdown. A video diary and poetry both, it explores the ways in which we define and create our identities within nature, and the safe spaces we seek out in an increasingly unsafe world. It brings together poetry, thoughts, conversations, footage and recordings by Durre and writer Kandace Siobhan Walker and invites the audience to engage and converse with them on the themes of identity, nature, belonging, landscape, and memory.

The film has been screened at various grassroots venues and festivals, such as Migration Matters Festival, Green Man Festival, and screened alongside Larry Achiampong’s film Wayfinder at Chapter. It has also been used it in workshops to encourage participants to explore their relationship to nature and experimental and creative ways to express that connection.

Read more about the film at Azeema Mag.

Visual Work and Exbhitions

  • Language Patters, G39, We Ran Together

  • Language Patterns, G39, We Ran Together

  • Queer Ecology, Dyddia Du

  • MATKA, Future Wales Fellowship Exhibition, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery

  • On Loss and Damage