Kennedy, Cate

Cate Kennedy had a peripatetic childhood, living with her parents in several Australian states and the United Kingdom. She studied at the then Canberra College of Advanced Education (later the University of Canberra) and the Australian National University, gaining a BA and a B.Litt.

Kennedy has worked as a freelance later and has been writer-in residence at various Melbourne schools. She has taught creative writing to senior students and scriptwriting to University of Ballarat students. For several years Kennedy was a community arts worker in Daylesford in country Victoria. She has also been involved in the organisation of various street festivals in Victoria.

In the 1990s Kennedy spent two years in Central Mexico, working in a cooperative as a volunteer with Australian Volunteers International, teaching literacy to peasant communities. During this time she wrote mainly non-fiction.

Kennedy is primarily a short story writer and has won numerous awards for her work, which has been published in major Australian newspapers. It was her observations while working for the Australian Customs Service that inspired Kennedy to write her prize-winning short story Habit about a dying woman's attempt to smuggle cocaine into the country. Her writing of poetry resulted in her collection Signs of Other Fires (2001) which draws on her experiences in Mexico and on her observations of daily life.

Kennedy won the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize (2002) which enabled her to travel to Ireland to study and teach.

Kennedy's home is a farm on the Broken River in northeast Victoria.