Catrin Kean

Catrin Kean or Catrin Clarke is a Welsh writer. Her debut novel Salt won the Wales Book of the Year in 2021. Writing as Catrin Clarke, she won a BAFTA Cymru award for screenwriting in 2003 for her work on the BBC Wales drama Belonging.

Early life Kean was born in Wales, and is of Welsh, Irish, English and Bajan heritage. She is based in Cardiff. with credits including Casualty, Mistresses and Wolfblood. In 2016, she became a Hay Festival Writer at Work, a new long-term development programme for selected writers born, living and/or educated in Wales. Kean was one of the first cohort of writers, and completed a 10-day residency at the festival in 2016, 2017 and 2018.

Kean's first novel Salt was published by Gomer Press in 2020. The novel tells the story of the author's Welsh great-grandmother Ellen meeting and marrying her great-grandfather Samuel, a ship’s cook from Barbados, in 1878 and subsequently travelling with him at sea. while Wales Arts Review called it 'a gripping love story of significant cultural importance...set against the intergenerational, inherited trauma caused by slavery and colonialism.' At the 2021 Wales Book of the Year Awards, Salt won the 'triple crown': taking the Rhys Davies Trust Fiction Award, the Wales Arts Review People's Choice Award and the overall prize for Wales Book of the Year. Lace, Kean's second novel and the sequel to Salt, was published by Honno in 2024.