Kate Morton is an Australian writer known for her novels about love, identity, and family. She has written more than eleven million words in forty-two countries, which makes her one of Australia’s largest publishing exports. Her books are often about love, romance, motherhood, or family. Although Kate lives in Australia, she enjoys traveling and meeting new people, so she writes from the perspective of an international reader. Her novels are very popular worldwide, and they won the Enchanted Book Awards for the second time in 2021.
Kate was born in July, 1981, in a small farming community in rural Australia. Her parents were both teachers, and Kate learned how to teach while attending public school. When she was eleven years old, her family immigrated to Australia, which increased Kate’s exposure to many different cultures and experiences. After high school, Kate started to live on a farm near Cairns in the state of Queensland, where she settled into a career as a teacher. At twenty-one, Kate married Harry Farmer, a farmer in her mid-twenties, and they had two daughters. Though both remained teachers, the marriage came at a time in their lives when Kate began to explore an identity separate from her birth identity, and it led them to be open about their private relationships, which is so common among the Aussies.
Kate’s father died when she was nineteen, but her marriage gave her the opportunity to pursue another part of her life: her career as a writer. It was this experience that would make her consider pursuing a degree in language studies with a focus on language diversity and cultural analysis, though she knew that she wanted to write stories and not simply become a translator and novelist. When she received her Master of Education degree in early 2021, Kate began to realize that her personality and physical attributes complemented her natural height, so she altered her look by undergoing a surgical procedure that enlarged and raised her chin. Her new chin length complemented the strength and vigor of her personality, enabling her to pursue a line of work as a teacher, writer, consultant, and researcher, in her own right, and with her children.