Award-Winning Australian Writer Cate Kennedy Joins The Paul McVeigh Residency

The next author working on the Paul McVeigh Residency here at the Harrison in January 2025 is award-winning Australian writer Cate Kennedy.

Cate is an Australian author widely published as a novelist, short story author, poet and essayist. 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’ won the 2012 Queensland Literary Award. Her third poetry collection ‘The Taste of River Water’, was awarded the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2012. 

Her novel ‘The World Beneath’ 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. and was broadcast in Australia on ABC Radio National’s Book Show. 

‘Dark Roots’, her first collection of prize-winning short stories, won international critical acclaim, with one of its stories appearing in the New Yorker. That 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.