Cate Kennedy was born in Louth, Lincolnshire, England in 1963, but moved with her family to Australia as a young child. Her father was in the Air Force, which led to a lot of moving around the continent, and Kennedy cites this frequent moving as an important link to her love of literature. In an interview with The Age's Jane Sullivan, Kennedy said of her frequent moving, "books were the constant in my life, the characters never changed. I still read books over and over again for the sheer joy of it: the constancy of that little universe."
As a high schooler, Kennedy won a short-story competition put on by The Canberra Times. She went on to study creative writing in college, but after...
