Durre Shahwar is a writer, researcher, and co-founder of ‘Where I’m Coming From’, a community collective for writers of colour in Wales. Her work is embedded in community facilitation, research, and creativity, crossing the boundaries between essay, autofiction, and prose poetry. Durre is an AHRC PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Cardiff University, where she teaches Creative Writing. Her work has been published in various places, notably: Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class (Dead Ink Books), We Shall Fight Until We Win (404 Ink), Homes For Heroes 100 (Festival of Ideas). She also co-edited Just So You Know (Parthian Books). Durre is currently writing her first book about belonging as a Welsh-Pakistani person., and her co-edited anthology, Gathering: Women of Colour on Nature will be published by 404 Ink in February 2024.

For this project, Durre worked with the Islamic community in Cardiff to consider what the future of our natural environment means to them. She said “Everyone is reliant on nature and climate emergency is something that effects us all, but something that we all respond to in various ways. Small changes can lead to big impact, and I’m looking forward to collaborating and conversing with various communities to find out what those small changes look like for them.”

Through this engagement she developed a new body of poetic work to respond to the themes of Nature and Us. These can be viewed here:

Nature and Us Poems - Durre Shahwar