Cirrus@Austlit

Reviewer, novelist and poet, Cath Kenneally is the eldest of eight children born to a Catholic Adelaide family. She was educated at Catholic schools and joined the Dominican sisters in 1968, studying at the Order's Sydney novitiate and Canberra student house. From here she began attending the Australian National University in 1971. She returned to Adelaide in 1973 to conclude her Honours degree in English and French at Flinders University, leaving the Dominicans in that year

In 1974 she moved with her new partner and baby to Hobart, completing a Dip. Ed in 1975 at Tasmania University. She taught high school in Hobart and then at Tasman District Area School, Nubeena. Meanwhile her relationship deteriorated and became violent, as reflected in her novel Room Temperature (written for her MA and published in 2001) and many poems in her collection Around Here. She moved to Sydney, taught Writing Skills at Macquarie University, had another baby in 1978, and relocated back to Adelaide, where her third child was born.

In 1985, her relationship with her first partner ended in a near-fatal assault. Over the next several years she began a career in radio at 5UV, and as a critic, writing for the Adelaide Review and the Weekend Australian. She has been Arts Producer at 5UV (now Radio Adelaide) since 1990, about the time she met her current partner, poet Ken Bolton. She began writing poetry after the death of her brother Patrick in 1990. In 1996 she began producing the nationally-broadcast community radio program Writers Radio, featuring interviews with published and emerging Australian writers and readings of their work. She has also presented a weekly two-hour arts program on Saturday mornings

Kenneally has become known as a feminist writer, many of her reviews dealing with feminist authors. Her own work has strong feminist themes, implicit and explicit, and is often humorous. She completed a second novel, 'Holmwood', for her PhD in creative writing at Adelaide University.