Catherine Czerkawska

There can be few stories stranger than that of Robert Kirk, minister of Aberfoyle in late seventeenth century Scotland. He was the seventh son of a seventh son, which supposedly gave him powers to communicate with the supernatural world. He wrote his treatise about that other world and the creatures we know as fairies in 1691 and called it The Secret Commonwealth. Only 100 copies were made, and it was lost until 1815 at which time that inveterate...

An intimate story of a Polish family torn apart by war: of heartbreak, loss, and survival against the odds. Julian Czerkawski was born in 1926 near Lwow, in Polish Galicia, on a farm with fertile grain fields and orchards. He was the son of a Polish lancer-one of the famous cavalrymen who carried forward the legacy of the hussar knights. But there would be no idyllic childhood for young Julian. Soviet annexation and then, in 1941, the German occupation...

“Burns on the Solway” is a one act poetic drama by award winning Scottish playwright, Catherine Czerkawska. It imagines the last few weeks in the life of Scottish poet Robert Burns, down on the Solway Coast in beautiful Dumfries and Galloway. It is an exploration of the enduring relationship between Rab and his wife Jean, a play about love and friendship, about sensuality and violence, about betrayal and — perhaps most of all — a play about...

The story of a murder and its aftermath. On Christmas Night in 1881, John Manley, a poor son of Irish immigrants living in the slums of Leeds, was fatally stabbed in a drunken quarrel. The frightened murderer went on the run, knowing that capture could see him hang. A few generations later, author Catherine Czerkawska begins to tease out the truth behind her great-great-uncle's tragic death. But she uncovers far more than she bargained for. In a personal...

Michael is a young man, living in contented isolation on a West of Scotland beach and making artworks with the pebbles and shells, the flotsam and jetsam he finds there. He is perfectly happy, but the people around him find his isolation disturbing, and when he comes upon an object washed ashore that may or may not be man-made, the world outside threatens to invade his solitude, with potentially disastrous consequences. “Quartz”, a full-length...