Kate Emma McCosh Clark

Kate Emma McCosh Clark (; 15 May 1847 – 30 November 1926) was a New Zealand children's writer, poet, artist and community worker. She wrote and illustrated an early New Zealand children's book, A Southern Cross Fairy Tale, which was published in London in 1891. Her other works included Persephone and other Poems and Maori Tales and Legends (1896).

Early life and marriage Clark was born at Ipswich, Suffolk, England, in 1847, to Susan Bonner and her husband, Henry Woolnough, an architect. She studied art and lived in London, earning a living by undertaking research for writers, often at the British Museum.

On 8 April 1875 she married James Clark, an Auckland businessman, in Melbourne. She had five children while they lived in Auckland, and their first son was born on 28 December 1875. From 1880 to 1883 her husband was the Mayor of Auckland.

After a number of her husband's businesses failed, the family moved to London in 1889, where Clark pursued a career as a writer. The book featured Santa Claus, goblins and fairy characters, but was set in the natural features and world of New Zealand, and was enhanced by notes on geological features such as the Pink and White Terraces by A.P.W. Thomas and on birds by Andreas Reischek. Clark said it was written for the children "growing up under the Southern Cross... with English speech and English hearts, to whom the Yule log at Christmas is unmeaning and the snows unknown".

She published a collection of verse in 1894 titled Persephone and other Poems. The poetry involved classical themes and a strong sense of nostalgia for natural beauty and childhood innocence.