AustLit

Catherine McNamara has a degree in African and Asian Modern History from Sydney University. In Australia, she worked as a travel/features writer for the Sydney Morning Herald for five years. In 1994, she moved to Africa, where she lived for thirteen years, including working in an embassy in Mogadishu, Somalia, and running a bar and traditional art gallery in Accra, Ghana. In 2007, she moved to Italy.

Her short stories and poems (many published under the name Catherine Conzato) have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in Australia, Britain, and the USA. In 2001, her non-fiction children's book Nii Kwei's Day: From Dawn to Dusk in a Ghanaian Town, with photographs by Ghanaian photographer Francis Provencal, was published by Frances Lincoln Children's Books in London.