Katherine Scholes spent her early childhood in England and Africa. Her family emigrated to Australia in 1969, when she was ten, and settled in Launceston, Tasmania. She completed a Bachelor of Education at the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education in 1980, after which she lived on Flinders Island, in Bass Strait, where she worked for a year as a primary teacher. She was also a teacher of English as a second language at Victoria Park Language Centre in 1982. That same year she married Roger Scholes, a film-maker, and worked with him on a variety of films and writing projects. In 1983 she authored 'Under Age', a weekly column in the Age newspaper (Melbourne). In the summer of 1985, she travelled to Antarctica to research Blue Chameleon. She has also written Grandma's God (1991), a work of religious instruction for children.