“Alan Bleasdale, Harold Pinter, Anthony Minghella, Dennis Potter…” Katharine Norbury is sitting in the offices of Bloomsbury books, looking at the ceiling, and reeling off a list of writers she worked with during her 20 or so years in TV. As an assistant film editor and script editor, “it had never occurred to me to write,” she says. “But suddenly I thought, ‘I’ve got something to say!’, so I started saying it – it was a very natural transition.”
The result is her first book, The Fish Ladder: A Journey Upstream, which was snapped up by Bloomsbury earlier this year and has already garnered praise from Sara Maitland and Philip Pullman, among others. A travelogue-cum-memoir, it explores a particularly turbulent time a few years ago in Norbury’s life when, in her mid-40s, she was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly after suffering a miscarriage, and then, two weeks after her bilateral mastectomies, received a curt letter from her birth mother (their first ever correspondence – Norbury was adopted as a baby) saying “she didn’t want anything to do with me”.
Tying this sad series of events together, however, is a heart-warming narrative about Norbury’s expeditions, either alone or with her nine-year-old daughter, following rivers from the sea to their source: journeys inspired by Neil Gunn, a Scottish writer recommended to Norbury by none other than Robert Macfarlane (she wrote to him after losing her husband’s first edition of The Wild Places, begging for a replacement). Consequently, The Fish Ladder is a wonderful blend of nature writing and memoir that will inevitably draw comparisons to Helen Macdonald’s bestseller, H is for Hawk.
“I wasn’t really writing it with publication in mind,” Norbury admits, “but when I had cancer, I realised it may be something that could be helpful [for others to read]… I almost felt like I had an obligation to make it a public piece of writing. But anything that didn’t have the potential to touch the lives of other people – things like adoption, cancer, motherhood – I pared away.”
Five years on from those events, and after enjoying an MA in creative writing at UEA, Norbury is now working on her next book, about the circus. “I wouldn’t have wanted to go through life without something that had my name on it,” she says, and not wanting to sound vain, adds: “At my age, it’s very relaxing to know there’s something out there that has some of my philosophy and thoughts in it… I’m very happy that I’ve finally said something.”
THREE MORE TO WATCH
• James Rebanks’s book The Shepherd’s Life: A Tale of the Lake District, in which he talks about his life and the land, will be published in April by Allen Lane.
• Neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan’s It’s All in Your Head: True Stories of Imaginary Illness explores the very real world of psychosomatic illness. It is published by Chatto in June.
• Geraldine Roberts’s The Angel and the Cad: Love, Loss and Scandal in Regency England (PanMacmillan, June) tells the story of heiress Catherine Tylney Long and her libertine husband, and of the scandal that ensued.
