ANNE KENNEDY has published a novella and two novels. A book of poetry,
Sing-song is due from Auckland University Press in May. Her
short fictions have featured widely in New Zealand journals and anthologies.
She has been awarded the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award,
the ICI Award and a Literary Fellowship at the University of Auckland.
Anne Kennedy works as a scriptwriter – most recently adapting
Monkey’s Mask for cinema – and as a reviewer.
She lives in Auckland with her partner, Robert Sullivan, and their
two children.
Kennedy comments: ‘Cat Tales is from a book-length sequence,
Sing-song. The sequence tells the story of the onslaught
of severe eczema in a child, triggered by a homeopathic treatment.
I started out to write the story as an essay or article, which I hoped
to sell to a magazine, as a warning to the general public about the
pitfalls of alternative medicine. I felt I had a duty to do this.
I soon realised I had more to say on the subject of children and families
and illness and love than they would stomach in The Woman’s
Weekly, or North and South magazine. I wanted to say
these things in a way that transcended or became more than the real
events – i.e., became a kind of poetry. But I never lost the
feeling of my mission to let people know.’