Artist profiles - Durre Shahwar - Writer
Writing and Visual Expression
Durre Shahwar is a Pakistani-Welsh writer, researcher, visual artist, editor, and educator based in Wales. Her work explores themes of identity, memory, nature, decolonisation, and belonging, often combining together personal experience with broader political and cultural commentary. With a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from Cardiff University, Durre works across forms and disciplines, treating creativity with the same seriousness as any profession. Her current practice spans autofiction, non-fiction, short stories, prose poetry, scriptwriting, and visual art.
She is currently developing her debut non-fiction book, which was Highly Commended for the Morley Lit Prize, while expanding her visual practice, supported by Arts Council of Wales.
Creative Practice & Interdisciplinary Work
Durre’s creative output is rooted in writing, but her practice moves fluidly across disciplines. From visual art and film to literary curation and teaching, she builds new forms of storytelling that reflect her intersectional identity. Whether editing, curating, facilitating or making, she remains committed to nurturing space for underrepresented voices, especially within literature and nature writing.
Her writing blends the critical with the lyrical, often drawing on personal histories and inherited memories to explore ideas of home, faith, displacement, and the environment. Her approach to creativity is deeply informed by her academic training, yet her work remains accessible, intuitive, and emotionally resonant.
Gathering: Women of Colour on Nature (2024)
Durre is the co-editor of Gathering: Women of Colour on Nature (404 Ink, 2024), a landmark anthology that brings together powerful essays by women of colour from across the UK. The collection challenges the historic exclusion of marginalised voices from nature writing, and opens space for themes such as climate justice, neurodiversity, colonialism, mental health, class, and landscape.
Prior to this project, Durre also co-created a poetry and video diary film, Gathering: Women of Colour and Nature, with writer Kandace Siobhan Walker during her Located Residency and Springboard project with National Theatre Wales. This meditative short film explores how marginalised individuals define identity and belonging through their relationship with the natural world. It has been screened at:
Chapter Arts Centre (Cardiff)
Migration Matters Festival
Green Man Festival
Alongside Larry Achiampong’s Wayfinder at Chapter
As part of workshops, exhibitions, and ongoing festival programmes
Community Work & Literary Activism
Durre is the co-founder of Where I’m Coming From, Wales’ first open mic collective focused on platforming writers of colour. Co-created with writer and poet Hanan Issa, the collective was a vital response to the lack of diversity in Wales’ literary spaces. It hosted regular events, creative mentorships, and workshops in collaboration with organisations such as:
National Museum Cardiff
Hay Festival
Artes Mundi
Literature Wales
Where I’m Coming From marked a significant shift in how minoritised creatives are supported and seen within the Welsh arts landscape.
Durre also works closely with Literature Wales, leading creative writing workshops such as Telling Underrepresented Stories Through the Creative Essay & Short Story, and delivering nature writing sessions through programmes like Representing Wales and Writing Well. She is currently developing a series of workshops aimed at South Asian Communities that use writing as arts therapy.
Exploring faith & Nature
Durre’s recent script, The Fig Tree (Sherman Theatre) explores the powerful intersection between faith, nature, and childhood imagination. Centred around a young girl’s efforts to save a fig tree in her neighbourhood, the story unfolds as a thoughtful exploration of care and belief.
The fig tree becomes more than just a plant, it symbolises sanctuary, resilience, and spiritual connection. Figs are one of the fruits mentioned in the Qur’an, and their presence in the story reflects a subtle thread of Durre’s faith intertwined into the narrative. Rather than overtly religious, the script draws from the symbolic and emotional resonance of faith and how it can shape one’s relationship with the world, especially the natural world.
Through the lens of a child, The Fig Tree explores how acts of protection of trees, of belief, of community can become expressions of both resistance and hope. Like much of Durre’s work, the script speaks to layered identities and the strength found in often overlooked spaces.
Philosophy & Advice
Durre’s creative journey has been shaped by both personal persistence and academic rigour. She speaks proudly of her PhD, not only as a personal milestone, but as a transformative moment in her creative process that fundamentally reshaped her understanding of herself as an artist and thinker.
Coming from a background where creative careers are often seen as unstable or secondary, particularly within some parts of the South Asian community, Durre is deeply aware of the cultural pressures that can discourage young people, especially women from pursuing art as a serious path. For a long time, her creative ambitions were met with uncertainty and concern. But over time, her parents came to witness the depth, impact, and recognition her work was receiving. Their eventual support is something she holds close: not just a personal victory, but a quiet challenge to the idea that art isn’t a “real” profession.
Durre treats creativity with the seriousness of any profession and encourages others, especially those from underrepresented or culturally marginalised communities, to do the same. Her advice:
“Pursue everything. Trust your gut. Be the disruptor. Don’t let anyone tell you what you can and can’t do.”
For Durre, nature is one of the most important spaces for this disruption, a site of imagination, resistance, and belonging that should be open and accessible to all.
Connect with Durre:
You can find Durre's work on:
Website: www.durreshahwar.com
Instagram : @durre_s
