HYPOXIA, the new studio album by northern singer-songwriter Kathryn Williams, is a collection of songs inspired by Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.

Released on One Little Indian, it will be accompanied by a tour that visits the Black Swan Inn, Peasholme Green, York, on June 17.

The Hypoxia project began in 2013 when New Writing North asked Kathyrn if she would accept an open commission to write material for the Durham Book Festival’s celebration of Plath’s life and work, commemorating the 50th anniversary of The Bell Jar’s publication and the writer’s death in 1963.

Kathryn re-read the book for the first time since her teens. “What I wasn’t prepared for was the muscular writing,” she says. “The shocking, brutal honesty. The modernness. Thinking about a woman writing this 50 years ago was astounding.”

Last October, she performed five Plath-inspired original songs at Durham Town Hall but found she was unable to escape the lure of the book’s characters and continued to write songs. “This strange little cuckoo that had pushed my other records out of the way was demanding to be fed,” she says.

Finally, with eight songs ready, she enlisted Ed Harcourt to produce and engineer the album, also co-writing a ninth song, Cuckoo, with him.

Hypoxia will be preceded by the single Mirrors on June 8. “Mirrors are a recurring theme in the book; I love the idea of mirrors as a window to nowhere,” she says.

Tickets for Kathryn’s 7.30pm concert can be booked at ents24.com and wegottickets.com