ABOUT

SHORT BIO

Catherine Norton is the author of children’s novels Hester Hitchins and the Falling Stars, The Fortune Maker and Crossing. She studied creative writing at university and began writing middle grade fiction after working at a children’s publisher. She was born in the UK but grew up (mostly) in South Australia, where she lives on Kaurna country with her family and a very lazy whippet called Archer.

MORE ABOUT ME

I’ve wanted to write since I was very young. Before I started school I wrote stories about a character called Yak who ate ‘kabijes’. Yak might have been a TV character, so I guess you could call it fanfiction, as was Mr Nose, my early attempt at a Mr Men book. I have a clear memory of being dissatisfied with Mr Nose, despite its carefully sticky-taped binding. Not long ago it was eaten by termites in my garden shed along with my teenage diaries and an entire wardrobe. Now I will never remember what happened in September 1989 or why Mr Nose wasn’t up to scratch.

In year five, my school librarian let me shelve a home-made book of poetry in the library. Then, when I was thirteen, I posted off the typed manuscript of my first novel, Ethel Hubert Hates Cats.

Ethel wasn’t publishable – it wasn’t even long enough to be a novel – but here is the cool thing about it: years later, I ended up working at the publishing house that rejected it. And a few years after that, my first novel Crossing was published by that house, and edited by the same person who wrote my first (very encouraging) rejection letter.

Twenty-seven years later.

(When they say you have to be persistent in this business, they’re not joking).

I hadn’t only been writing in the decades between Ethel and Crossing; I’d been travelling and working at all sorts of other jobs and having kids and reading and studying and teaching English and Creative Writing at university. I’d been planning to write the Great Australian Novel (naturally), but working at a children’s publisher changed all that. There, I read lots of manuscripts for picture books and middle grade and young adult novels. I saw magical illustrations. I listened to grown-up professionals have very earnest discussions about the character development of dragons. And the eleven-year-old still tucked away in me somewhere brightened right up and asked, remember how good it was to cry over Watership Down and Bridge to Terabithia? To laugh at The Phantom Tollbooth? To relate so hard to Erika Yurken in Hating Alison Ashley that you read it seven times in a row?

I did remember. And I forgot all about the Great Australian Novel and decided I wanted to write books I would have loved at eleven years old, when I still had a lot to learn about writing, but was the best reader I have ever been.

Would you like to get in touch? I’d love to hear from you. Head on over to the contact page.

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