Catherine McKinnon is a novelist, playwright, and director. She studied at Flinders
University Drama Centre and then became a founding member of the Red Shed Theatre
Company. Over a nine-year period she worked for the Shed as a writer, director,
dramaturg, and co-artistic coordinator. She directed, and with company members and
writers, helped develop, many new Australian plays. Her own plays for the Shed are:
Immaculate Deceptions, A Rose By Any Other Name, Road to Mindanao, and Eye of Another.
During this time she also freelanced to the State Theatre Company of SA. Her directing
credits there include Diving For Pearls and Barmaids, by Katherine Thompson, Three Birds
Alighting On A Field, by Timberlake Wertenbaker, Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind, and
Morning Sacrifice by Dymphna Cusack. After leaving Adelaide she completed a Masters in
Creative Writing at UTS Sydney, and worked for April Films, on a documentary about the
making of Jindabyne, before undertaking a PhD at Flinders University, which included a
creative project, (a novel), and an exegesis. In 2006 she won the Penguin Women’s Weekly
Award for her short story Haley and the Sea. In 2008 Penguin Viking published her novel,
The Nearly Happy Family. Her play Tilt was selected for the 2010 National Playwriting
Festival in Brisbane and also for the 2011 High-Tide Genesis Research and Development
Laboratory in London. As I Lay Dreaming was a finalist in the Seaborn Award, had a
reading at Parnassus Den, and won the Mitch Mathews 2010 Award. She currently teaches
performance, writing, and directing at Wollongong University, is finishing work on her
novel, Storyland, and beginning work on a trilogy of plays, The Hurt Trilogy, set in the
Illawarra, New South Wales.