Catherine Czerkawska, author of The Physic Garden, is a Scottish-based novelist and playwright. She graduated from Edinburgh University with a degree in Mediaeval Studies, followed by a Masters in Folk Life Studies from the University of Leeds. She has written many plays for the stage and for BBC Radio and for television, and has published nine novels, historical and contemporary. Her short stories have been published in many literary magazines and anthologies and as ebook collections, most recently by Hearst Magazines UK. She has also written non-fiction in the form of articles and books and has reviewed professionally for newspapers and magazines. Wormwood, her play about the Chernobyl disaster, was produced at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre to critical acclaim in 1997, while her novel The Curiosity Cabinet was shortlisted for the Dundee Book Prize in 2005.
Catherine has taught creative writing for the Arvon Foundation and spent four years as Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the University of the West of Scotland. She is currently serving on the committee of the Society of Authors in Scotland. When not writing, she collects and deals in the antique textiles that often find their way into her fiction.