Kate Jennings

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

Biography Born at Temora, 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.

She also edited Mother I'm Rooted, an anthology of women poets which was the object of much controversy.

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 died on 1 May 2021, in New York. "a narrative of pure anguish" (The Times Literary Supplement), and "possessing a holographic shimmer" (The New York Times Book Review). It was reported to have just missed the Booker Prize shortlist. Moral Hazard has been called "humane and unsparing; witty, unsettling, and wildly intelligent" by Shirley Hazzard, author of The Transit of Venus.

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.

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.

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.

In March 2010, she published "Trouble", an autobiographical collection of her best work from the last four decades, 2003 shortlisted The Miles Franklin Award "Letting in the Sunlight", The Business Writer "An Otter's Life: Learning to Swim", The Monthly magazine, December 2010 – January 2011 issue

Essay collections Save Me, Joe Louis (1988) Bad Manners (1993)

Memoirs Stanley and Sophie (2008) Trouble (2010)