AustLit logo
image of person or book cover 5760721305075599315.jpg
Image by permission of the National Library of Australia.
Kate Grenville Kate Grenville i(A22750 works by) (a.k.a. Catherine Elizabeth Grenville)
Born: Established: 1950 Sydney, New South Wales, ;
Gender: Female
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

BiographyHistory

Kate Grenville was born and educated in Sydney, attending Cremorne Girls High School before taking a BA Honours from the University of Sydney in 1972.

In 1976, after working as an editor for Film Australia, Grenville travelled to the United Kingdom and Europe, working at several editorial and secretarial jobs. While in Europe, she began writing fiction. She was based in London and Paris between 1976 and 1980. 

In 1980 she moved to Colorado, USA, to complete a masters degree in creative writing at the University of Colorado. Several of her subsequent publications were developed here and she also began her career as a teacher of creative writing.

Grenville returned to Australia in 1983, where she began work at SBS Television, in the sub-titling department. Her first collection of short stories, Bearded Ladies, appeared in 1984. That year she also won the Australian/Vogel National Literary Award for her unpublished novel, Lilian's Story. Since then, she has produced novels including DreamhouseDark PlacesThe Idea of PerfectionThe Secret River, and Sarah ThornhillLilian's StoryThe Secret River, and Dreamhouse have all been filmed, the latter as TrapsThe Secret River was also adapted for the stage by Andrew Bovell: the stage adaptation won two Helpmann Awards, a Sydney Theatre Award, a NSW Premier's Award, and an AWGIE Award, while the television adaptation also won an AWGIE Award, as well as a Logie Award, and was shortlisted for an AACTA Award.

While Grenville's early fiction exhibits a strong feminist tone, her later fiction often explores the social limitations on both men and women. But it is Grenville's exploration of women's progress in both gothic and comic modes for which she is most admired.

Grenville's career as a teacher of creative writing has produced several books, including Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels Were Written (1993) which analyses the manuscripts of writers such as Peter Carey, Elizabeth Jolley and Patrick White. Grenville's writing career has been supported by several Australia Council grants and she has won a number of literary prizes, including the Christina Stead Prize (NSW Premier's Literary Awards), the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Orange Prize, and the Vance Palmer Prize (Victorian Premier's Literary Awards).

In 2017, she published the non-fiction work The Case Against Fragrance, an investigation into the science behind scent and the fragrance industry. Her other non-fiction work includes One Life : My Mother's Story, a biography of her mother, who had first trained and worked as a pharmacist and then, after returning to university, as an ESL teacher. 

Daughter of Kenneth Grenville.

Exhibitions

17022329
18387981

Most Referenced Works

Notes

  • In addition to works individually indexed on AustLit Kate Grenville has also published the following :

    The Case Against Fragrance : Text Publishing 2017

  • Voted number 31 in the Booktopia Top 50 Favourite Australian Authors for 2018

Personal Awards

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon Restless Dolly Maunder Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2023 26233790 2023 single work novel historical fiction

'Dolly Maunder was born at the end of the nineteenth century, when society’s long-locked doors were finally starting to creak ajar for women. Born into a poor farming family in country New South Wales but clever, energetic and determined, she spent her restless life pushing at those doors.

'Most women like Dolly have more or less disappeared from view, remembered only in a family photo album as a remote figure in impossible clothes, and maybe for a lemon-pudding recipe. Restless Dolly Maunder brings one of them to life as a person we can recognise and whose struggles we can empathise with.

'In this novel, Kate Grenville uses family memories and research to imagine her way into the life of her grandmother. This is the story of a woman born into a world of limits and obstacles who was able—though at a cost—to make a life for herself. Her battles and triumphs helped to open doors for the women who came after.' (Publication summary)

2024 longlisted Women's Prize Trust Awards Women's Prize for Fiction (UK)
2024 longlisted Indie Awards Fiction
y separately published work icon A Room Made of Leaves Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2020 18931283 2020 single work novel historical fiction

'Do not believe too quickly…

'What if Elizabeth Macarthur—wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in early Sydney—had written a shockingly frank secret memoir?

'In her introduction Kate Grenville tells, tongue firmly in cheek, of discovering a long-hidden box containing that memoir. What follows is a playful dance of possibilities between the real and the invented.

'Grenville’s Elizabeth Macarthur is a passionate woman managing her complicated life—marriage to a ruthless bully, the impulses of her own heart, the search for power in a society that gave her none—with spirit, cunning and sly wit.

'Her memoir reveals the dark underbelly of the polite world of Jane Austen. It explodes the stereotype of the women of the past: devoted and docile, accepting of their narrow choices. That was their public face—here’s what one of them really thought.

'At the centre of this book is one of the most toxic issues of our times: the seductive appeal of false stories. Beneath the surface of Elizabeth Macarthur’s life and the violent colonial world she navigated are secrets and lies with the dangerous power to shape reality.

'A Room Made of Leaves is the internationally acclaimed author Kate Grenville’s first novel in almost a decade. It is historical fiction turned inside out, a stunning sleight of hand that gives the past the piercing immediacy of the present.'(Publication summary)

2021 longlisted Voss Literary Prize
2021 longlisted HNSA Historical Novel Prize Adult
2021 shortlisted The Age Book of the Year Award Book of the Year
2021 winner New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Christina Stead Prize for Fiction
2021 shortlisted The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
2021 shortlisted Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) Australian Literary Fiction Book of the Year
2021 longlisted Indie Awards Fiction
y separately published work icon One Life : My Mother's Story Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2015 8222311 2015 single work biography (taught in 1 units)

'Nance was a week short of her sixth birthday when she and Frank were roused out of bed in the dark and lifted into the buggy, squashed in with bedding, the cooking pots rattling around in the back, and her mother shouting back towards the house: Goodbye, Rothsay, I hope I never see you again!

'When Kate Grenville’s mother died she left behind many fragments of memoir. These were the starting point for One Life, the story of a woman whose life spanned a century of tumult and change. In many ways Nance’s story echoes that of many mothers and grandmothers, for whom the spectacular shifts of the twentieth century offered a path to new freedoms and choices. In other ways Nance was exceptional. In an era when women were expected to have no ambitions beyond the domestic, she ran successful businesses as a registered pharmacist, laid the bricks for the family home, and discovered her husband’s secret life as a revolutionary.

'One Life is an act of great imaginative sympathy, a daughter’s intimate account of the patterns in her mother’s life. It is a deeply moving homage by one of Australia’s finest writers.' (Publication summary)

2016 shortlisted ASAL Awards The Australian Historical Association Awards Magarey Medal for Biography
2016 shortlisted New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction
2016 shortlisted Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) Australian General Non-Fiction Book of the Year
2016 shortlisted Indie Awards Nonfiction
Last amended 17 Oct 2019 08:56:51
Other mentions of "" in AustLit:
    X