Catherine Amy Dawson Scott (1865 – 1934 - British writer, playwright and poet.

Catherine is perhaps best known as a co-founder of International PEN, a worldwide association of writers.  Although she was a poet I have not yet been able to find any of Catherine's poems

Catherine Amy Dawson was born in August 1865. Her parents were  Ebenezer Dawson, a brick manufacturer and his wife Catherine, nee Armstrong.  Catherine had a sister - Ellen M. Dawson - born in 1868. The Journalist, writer, novelist and poet Henry Dawson Lowry (22 February 1869 – 21 October 1906) was their cousin. Amy and Ellen’s mother died in January 1877.   In 1878, their father remarried. According to the 1881 Census, the girls and their stepmother were living or staying with her widowed mother, Sarah Ancell, in Camberwell, where Catherine A. Dawson graduated from The Anglo German College

When she was eighteen, Catherine began working as a secretary. In June 1896, Catherine married Dr. Horatio Francis Ninian Scott. They lived in Hanover Square in London, where their first child, Marjorie Catharine Waiora Scott, was born in 1899 and a son, Horatio Christopher L. Scott, was born in March 1901. The family moved to West Cowes on the Isle of Wight in the summer of 1902, where they lived for the next seven years. Another child, Edward Walter Lucas Scott, nicknamed Toby, was born in June 1904.

At the start of the First World War, Dr Scott volunteered to join the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) and was posted to France.   Meanwhile, with the help of the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, Catherine founded The Women’s Defence Relief Corps in August 1914.   

When Catherine and her husband returned from their wartime service, they found it impossible to resume their relationship as before, after the traumatic (and empowering, for Catherine) experiences of the war.  They were divorced and Dr. Scott commited suicide in 1922.

If anyone can help find poems by Catherine please get in touch.