Catherine Mayo

Cath Mayo is a children's, young adults' and adult novelist, short story writer and musician with a special interest in Greek myths and legends and Late Bronze Age prehistory. She lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Biography Cath (Catherine) Mayo grew up in Auckland, New Zealand. Books were an important part of her childhood and she can remember being captivated by Barbara Leonie Picard’s retelling of The Odyssey of Homer, so much so that she used to act out parts of the story and make up extra scenes herself. Two other favourite historical authors were Rosemary Sutcliff and Mary Renault.

She went on to study a wide variety of subjects at the University of Auckland, including history, art history, philosophy, geology, French, music and performance violin. Later she returned to university to study Ancient Greek, so as to be able to read and understand Homer's poetry in more depth, and she has continued to read and learn about the archaeology of Late Bronze Age Greece. at The Stringed Instrument Company Limited. During the 1980s, she was a member of the band Gentle Annie which toured Oregon and Alaska in 1980. The band performed alongside Limbs Dance Company in Los Angeles in 1986 and at the World Expo in Brisbane in 1988. It played many live shows and appeared as a feature act and as backing vocal group on the television programme That's Country. Cath won the Australian national bluegrass fiddle championship at the Tamworth Country Music Festival in January 1983. and continues to be fascinated by the layers of history visible in the ancient sites and buildings.

In 2014 she spoke at Victoria University of Wellington's Athens to Aotearoa conference, looking from a writer's perspective at Classical Greek influences in New Zealand. In 2016 she presented a paper at the IBBY Conference in Auckland, titled A Reader's odyssey: parallel journeys on the far side of the world; this covered the parallels between Homer's world and traditional Maori and Polynesian culture.

Awards and prizes Cath Mayo was shortlisted for the Storylines Tom Fitzgibbon Award in 2008.

Her first book, Murder at Mykenai, which focuses on Odysseus and Menelaos as teenagers, received a Storylines Notable Book Award for Young Adult Fiction in 2014.