Kate Jennings

In March 2010, she published "Trouble", an autobiographical collection of her best work from the last four decades, covering topics from politics, morality, finance, feminism and the writing life.

In 2008, she published Stanley and Sophie, a memoir ostensibly about her dogs but also about life in New York City after 9/11, politics in the US and her encounters with two macaques in Bali at the time of the 2005 bombing there.

Jennings was awarded the Christina Stead Prize for fiction for Moral Hazard, which was also shortlisted for the 2003 Miles Franklin Award, the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize, and the Tasmania Pacific Region Prize. Snake was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, as was Moral Hazard.

In 1983, Jennings met Bob Cato, a graphic designer, photographer, and collagist who helped turn the record album into an important form of contemporary art. They were married in 1987; he died in March 1999.

She moved to New York City in 1979, where she wrote for numerous magazines and newspapers, in addition to a stint on Wall Street as a speechwriter.

Jennings grew up on a farm near Griffith, New South Wales. She attended the University of Sydney in the late 1960s, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree with honours. She was active in feminist and left wing-movements, in particular gaining notoriety for an incendiary speech given before a Vietnam Moratorium march in 1970 – a speech that is credited with signalling the beginning of the second wave of feminism in Australia.

Both books contain strong autobiographical elements, Snake being about a girl growing up on a Riverina farm in the 1950s, and Moral Hazard about a couple facing Alzheimer's in the husband while the wife works as a speechwriter on Wall Street.

Catherine Ruth Jennings (20 May 1948 – 1 May 2021) was an Australian poet, essayist, memoirist, and novelist.