Durre Shahwar is a writer, researcher, and artist. She is the co-editor of Gathering, an essay anthology on nature, climate, the landscape by women of colour (out now with 404 Ink). Durre is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate in Creative Writing, researching autofiction and marginalised and hybrid identities. She teaches undergraduate Creative Writing modules and is an Associate Fellow of Higher Education. Durre is currently working on her first sole-authored book, a sample of which was shortlisted and highly commended for the Morley Lit Prize 2022.

Durre has been a Wasafiri Magazine Writer-in-Residence. She 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. Her visual work has also been part of G39’s ‘We Ran Together’ exhibition. Established in 2017, Durre is the co-founder of ‘Where I’m Coming From’, the first open mic collective for writers of colour in Wales. In the past, she has been a part of Hay Festival Writers at Work, BBC Writersroom Wales Development Programme, an Artist in Residence at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, and a Located Residency Artist with National Theatre Wales.

Durre’s work overlaps the boundaries between non-fiction, essay, autofiction, short story, and experimental hybrid writing 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. Her short play 'On My Terms' was performed at Edinburgh Fringe.

Research and Writing Interests: nature writing, language, autofiction, decolonising creative writing, intersectionality, class, race, migration, gender, mental health, ekphrastic writing,