Kerry Andrew – Composer
Thursday 24 July 2025
“Brilliantly inventive…” The Times
Kerry Andrew is a UK-based writer, composer and performer, and the author of three literary novels, Swansong, SKIN and We Are Together Because. They won the Edinburgh Short Story Award 2024, a Northern Writers’ Award for Fiction 2025, and have been twice shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. With a PhD in composition from the University of York and four British Composer Awards, Kerry specialises in experimental vocal and choral music, music-theatre and community music, creates alt-folk as You Are Wolf and co-founded the award-winning Juice Vocal Ensemble.
Kerry’s short story debut was commissioned by BBC Radio 4 in 2014. Kerry’s first novel Swansong was published by Vintage in 2018, and second novel SKIN was published in 2021. A third novel, We Are Together Because, was published by Atlantic in 2024 and was The New European’s Fiction Book of the Year 2024. Kerry was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2018 and again in 2022; was a prizewinner in the international Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize 2021; and was longlisted for the Nature Chronicles Prize 2022. They won the Edinburgh Short Story Prize 2024 with their story The Coffin Path. They received a New Writing North Northern Writers’ Award 2025 to work on their first historical novel.
As a composer, Kerry has created work for Art on the Underground; BBC Ten Pieces at the BBC Proms, including being made into a cartoon character for BBC Bitesize; a work simultaneously performed by 25 community ensembles around the UK for the Landmark Trust; and socially-driven pieces about the NHS and Covid vaccines for the London Sinfonietta. Other posts include Handel House Composer In Residence 2010-12, Visiting Professor at Leeds College of Music, and British Council/PRSF Musician in Residence in China in 2016. In 2019, Kerry’s work Under the Same Sky for large-scale girls’ choir and taiko drums was premiered at Sydney Opera House, and vocal music was composed for ‘Rutherford and Sons’ at London’s National Theatre. Other commissioners have included the Ligeti Quartet, Mahogany Opera, Icebreaker, ORA Singers, the Foundling Museum and music has been performed by the Hermes Experiment, the Heath Quartet, CHROMA, Rolf Hind, the Hilliard Ensemble, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Southbank Sinfonia, members of the CBSO, and nationally and internationally by Juice Vocal Ensemble.
In 2010, Kerry won a British Composer Award for the choral work Fall in the Making Music category. In 2014, the wild swimming opera Dart’s Love won in the Stage Works category, and the community chamber opera Woodwose, written for Wigmore Hall, won in the Education and Community Category. In 2017, Kerry won a fourth award for the vocal/body percussion work Who we are, premiered by the 600 singers of the massed National Youth Choirs of Great Britain at the Royal Albert Hall.
Kerry’s work is broadcast regularly on BBC Radio 3, and has been heard on Radios 2, 4 & 5, & 6 Music. Choral/vocal work published by Oxford University Press, University of York Music Press & Faber Music and works recorded on Naxos, Presto Classics, Delphian, Resonus Classics & Nonclassical.
Kerry co-founded the award-winning experimental post-a cappella trio Juice Vocal Ensemble, who have released two albums on the Nonclassical label. Kerry also performs/produces alt-folk as You Are Wolf, exploring traditional songs and lore in unusual, electronica-tinged arrangements. You Are Wolf’s second album, Keld, was awarded fRoots magazine’s Editor’s Choice! Album of the Year 2018 and was in the Guardian’s Top Ten Folk Albums 2018. Their third album, hare // hunter // moth // ghost was The Guardian’s Folk Album of the Month in November 2023. The Lost Words: Spell Songs in 2019, saw Kerry work alongside musicians including Julie Fowlis and Karine Polwart, and have a song Bluebell performed with orchestra at the BBC Proms. Kerry was also a multi-instrumentalist with the rock/classical/jazz quintet DOLLYman.
Kerry has presented the New Music Show on BBC Radio 3, and was 2018’s Chair of the Judges for BBC Young Musician.
