Deborah Trayhurn has lived in a number of countries, including France, Canada and Norway, before settling in Perthshire, Scotland. She trained as a painter (under Terry Frost and Claude Rogers), although writing, starting out as beguiling jottings in the margins of drawings, is now her prevailing passion. She uses the highland landscape as a canvas on which to project musings, the echoes that bounce back becoming poems, and sometimes paintings. The differing possibilities in the formal elements of each language intrigue her. She is also working on a ‘poetic history of art’.

She meets regularly with the lively group of writers in Perth, who come together in Willie Soutar’s old house in Wilson Street, under the penetrating eye of the writer-in-residence, Ajay Close.

Publications

Her poems have been published in several competition publications, including the Bridport Prize, (Runner-up, 2002); Manchester Cathedral International Poetry Competition (First prize, 2008); and in anthologies such as Mint Sauce and other stories and poems, Cinnamon Press (2008) and New Writing Scotland 27 (2009).

Embracing Water, HappenStance 2009, is her first collection. It is No 1 in the new ‘Sequence’ series.