Cate Kennedy is an Australian author widely published as a novelist, short story author, poet and essayist.  She studied Professional Writing and Editing at the University of Canberra and Literature Studies at the Australian National University and attained her PhD in Creative Writing by Research at La Trobe University in 2021, where her doctoral thesis was awarded the Nancy Millis Medal. She worked in theatre and community development before settling into freelance writing, and in her home country of Australia is best-known as a short story practitioner. She currently writes for Womankind magazine, the Saturday Paper, the Monthly and Griffith Review, and is in high demand as a writing teacher, mentor and editor in both adult writing workshops and writer-in-residency school programs.  She has taught throughout Australia, as well as in Singapore, Vietnam, Bali, Fiji, Vanuatu, France, Austria and the U.S.A. She is currently a faculty member of Pacific University’s MFA in Creative Writing program in Portland, Oregon, teaching both fiction and non-fiction.  Her story collection, Like A House on Fire was published by Scribe in Australia in 2012 and the UK and went on to win the 2012 Queensland Literary Award as well as being shortlisted for the inaugural Stella Prize and the Kibble Award. The collection has been on the Victorian VCE School Syllabus as an English text for five years, along with her earlier collection Dark Roots. Her third poetry collection The Taste of River Water, released by Scribe in 2011, was awarded the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2012.  Her novel The World Beneath’(published in Australia by Scribe in 2009 and by Grove Atlantic in the U.S. and the U.K.) was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year Award, the Barbara Jefferis Award and the N.S.W. Premier’s Prize for fiction.  It won the “People’s Choice” prize in these awards and has been translated into French and Mandarin. Her travel memoir “Sing and Don’t Cry: a Mexican Journal” (Transit Lounge, 2005) was published in Canada and the U.S.A. as an illustrated condensed book through the Reader’s Digest “Encounters” series, and broadcast in Australia on ABC Radio National’s Book Show. Dark Roots, her first collection of prize-winning short stories, was released in Australia by Scribe in September 2006 and through Grove Books in the US and Atlantic the UK in 2008 to wide international critical acclaim, with one of its stories appearing in the New Yorker on September 11th, 2006.  Upon its U.S. publication this collection was given a starred review in both Publisher’s Weekly and the Kirkus Review and was chosen as a Barnes and Noble Great New Writers selection for 2008.  Cate was also chosen in July 2008 as ‘Oprah’ magazine’s “New Voice of the Month”. Cate’s short stories have appeared in many Australian literary journals and periodicals, in ‘Best Australian Stories’ 2006, 2007, 2009 and 2015, ‘The Best of the Best Australian Short Stories’ in 2010, and internationally in publications such as Prospect magazine, British Women’s Weekly, World Literature Today, Ploughshares and The Harvard Literary Review.  Her story “Measure Twice, Cut Once”, which appeared in World Literature Today in 2014, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  Her short story ‘Cold Snap’ (which appeared in the New Yorker as ‘Black Ice’) was made into a short film in New Zealand in 2012, selected for the Venice Film Festival 2013 and won the Jury Prize at Hong Kong Film Festival April 2014. Both her novel and her short stories have been made into Australian audiobooks.