Getting to Know | Catherine Banner
Catherine Banner is a British author living in Turin. She is a member of the PEN International Writers Circle and Italian PEN. Catherine has written a trilogy of young adult novels, and her 2016 novel The House at the Edge of Night was included in New York Magazine’s ‘100 Best Beach Reads Ever’ as well as being a Kirkus Reviews and NPR Best Book of 2016. Catherine joined the Writers Circle because she was preoccupied with contemporary political developments and wanted to support her colleagues whose freedom to write had become more restricted, as well as to support freedom of speech, literature and education as forces for change in the world in an ongoing way. She noticed that many of the writers she most admired were part of the Writers Circle, but that there were no writers from her own generation in the group, something she wanted to change.
A native of Cambridge (where she was also educated) Catherine has been writing since she was 14 and signed the contract for her first young adult novel at the ripe old age of 16. Despite such early success she was unsure if she wished to become a full-time writer so trained as a teacher and taught for a time in the north of England. She is currently working on a novel but is also involved with a major not-for-profit project called VOICE.
The aim of VOICE is to provide a platform for people working for change in their own countries to tell their own stories, in their own words. It will be the first book of its kind, aiming to unite stories of development, health and social care and peace-related workers for the first time. There are 15 individual stories from around the world and they will be collectively published in a book called A Definition of Snow. In order to ensure that the writers retain control of their stories the book will be published by Unbound, a crowdfunding publisher.
Catherine’s motivation for being part of VOICE is to support the writers in telling their stories as writing advisor to the group. ‘As soon as I read the stories, I knew that there was something unique and powerful about them,’ she says. ‘Working with the writers over the past two years has only confirmed to me that their stories need to be told. There is something very hard to put into words about hearing these writers from around the world talk about global issues in aid and development from a unique position, as agents for change in their own communities. We have brought together, for example, a refugee writer who travelled from Eritrea to Germany to train as a doctor, a female medic in Bolivia who writes about the challenges of her role in a tiny rural hospital, a Chinese emergency responder who has travelled to five natural disasters in as many years, and many others from countries as diverse as India and South Sudan, Palestine and Cameroon. And yet, many of the themes our writers touch on are the same. We are a small organisation and crowdfunding a book is a challenge for us, but our hope is to project our writers’ voices on a world stage and bring their stories to readers in developed countries, who genuinely want to read more diverse stories but often don’t have the opportunity. Our writers don’t wish to receive a profit from their work, so if we can also raise money for PEN International, an organisation which fits with our aims of breaking down barriers and telling diverse stories from around the world, that would mean a great deal to our writers too.’
All the proceeds from the book will be donated to PEN International. You can read more about the project and help make it happen at www.unbound.com/books/a-definition-of-snow.
You can read more about Catherine at www.catherine-banner.com, and more about PEN International's Make Space campaign, which creates opportunities for displaced or exiled writers, at PEN International's Make Space page.