Kate Morton Biography
Kate Morton is an international bestselling Australian author born in 1976 in Berri, South Australia. Her first novel, ‘The House at Riverton’ was one of the most successful UK debuts of all time.
Kate studied for and earned a Licentiate in Speech and Drama from Trinity College, London and completed a summer Shakespeare course at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Later she earned first-class honours in English Literature at the University of Queensland (1999) and won a scholarship to complete a master’s degree focussing on tragedy in Victorian literature.
Kate Morton’s Photo
Kate Morton Career
Kate Morton did an acting course at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She attended one audition for a play at the Old Vic.
”But one of the actors there told me if I wanted a career in theatre, I’d need to be prepared to live in a cardboard box,” she says.
”People might think writing is a hard business, but it’s nowhere near acting. But then I was saved the choice. I was offered a scholarship to do my master’s on tragedy in Victorian novels, so came home to do that.”
Kate Morton studied and started writing in her spare time. She fell in love with it immediately.
”Once I discovered writing, I realised it offers everything that the theatre does, but you can do it yourself, in your own time,” she says. ”It was a much better fit for me. I realised that’s what I had to do.”
But it wasn’t easy. Money was tight and, at one point, fearing she and Davin might lose their house in Brisbane when they didn’t have enough to pay the mortgage, she worked in an all-you-can-eat fish restaurant, replenishing buckets of prawns, and then as a waitress at weddings.
”It was soul-destroying,” she says. ”But it was such a good education. It made me realise what kind of person I never want to become: the kind at a wedding who is offered a prawn, and takes six.”
It wasn’t a simple path to publication, either. Her first book was rejected by every publisher and was filed away in her bottom drawer. Her second book went exactly the same way. Finally, after reaching the halfway point on her third, she had her first baby and put the manuscript aside. She then received a call from Selwa Anthony, the agent who had discovered her.
”We have a publisher interested,” Anthony said. ”How long will it take you to finish it?” Morton was thrilled. ”Maybe two months?” Anthony didn’t miss a beat. ”Make that one month,” she said. ”We might lose the deal otherwise.”
Morton finished the book and it was a big hit. It looked as though it would be a smooth run from there, but it wasn’t. The second book did famously but then, while writing the third, Morton got lost. The book wasn’t working and, 60,000 words in, she decided to file it with the other rejects in that crowded bottom drawer and start again.
”That was hard, very hard,” she says. ”But it’s an awful feeling when you know you’re writing the wrong book. So I stopped and started another and completely fell in love with the new story. It just felt right.”
Just how right can be seen from the way many agents around the world report publishers constantly asking if they have anything ”like Kate Morton”.
”She’s created a genre completely of her own,” Anthony says. ”But that has to be good for Australian authors. It makes everyone take us a lot more seriously.”
Kate Morton Books/ Kate Morton Novels
- 2006: The House at Riverton (also known as The Shifting Fog)
- 2008: The Forgotten Garden
- 2010: The Distant Hours
- 2012: The Secret Keeper
- 2015: The Lake House
- 2018: The Clockmaker’s Daughter
Kate Morton The Secret Keeper
1961: On a sweltering summer’s day, while her family picnics by the stream on their Suffolk farm, sixteen-year-old Laurel hides out in her childhood tree house dreaming of a boy called Billy, a move to London, and the bright future she can’t wait to seize. But before the idyllic afternoon is over, Laurel will have witnessed a shocking crime that changes everything.
2011: Now a much-loved actress, Laurel finds herself overwhelmed by shades of the past. Haunted by memories, and the mystery of what she saw that day, she returns to her family home and begins to piece together a secret history. A tale of three strangers from vastly different worlds – Dorothy, Vivien and Jimmy – who are brought together by chance in wartime London and whose lives become fiercely and fatefully entwined.
Shifting between the 1930s, the 1960s and the present, The Secret Keeper is a spellbinding story of mysteries and secrets, theatre and thievery, murder and enduring love.
Kate Morton The Lake House
June 1933, and the Edevane family’s country house, Loeanneth, is polished and gleaming, ready for the much-anticipated Midsummer Eve party. Alice Edevane, sixteen years old and a budding writer, is especially excited. Not only has she worked out the perfect twist for her novel, she’s also fallen helplessly in love with someone she shouldn’t. But by the time midnight strikes and fireworks light up the night skies, the Edevane family will have suffered a loss so great that they leave Loeanneth forever.
Seventy years later, after a particularly troubling case Sadie Sparrow is sent on an enforced break from her job with the Metropolitan Police. Sadie retreats to her beloved grandfather’s cottage in Cornwall but soon finds herself at a loose end. Until one day, she stumbles upon an abandoned house surrounded by overgrown gardens and dense woods, and learns the story of a baby boy who disappeared without a trace.
Meanwhile, in the attic writing room of her elegant Hampstead home, the formidable Alice Edevane, now an old lady, leads a life as neatly plotted as the bestselling detective novels she writes. Until a young police detective starts asking questions about her family’s past, seeking to resurrect the complex tangle of secrets Alice has spent her life trying to escape…
Kate Morton The Forgotten Garden
Cassandra is lost, alone and grieving. Her much loved grandmother, Nell, has just died and Cassandra, her life already shaken by a tragic accident ten years ago, feels like she has lost everything dear to her. But an unexpected and mysterious bequest from Nell turns Cassandra’s life upside down and ends up challenging everything she thought she knew about herself and her family.
On the eve of the First World War, a little girl is found abandoned on a ship to Australia. A mysterious woman called the Authoress had promised to look after her – but the Authoress has disappeared without a trace.
On the night of her twenty-first birthday, Nell O’Connor learns a secret that will change her life forever. Decades later, she embarks upon a search for the truth that leads her to the windswept Cornish coast and the strange and beautiful Blackhurst Manor, once owned by the aristocratic Mountrachet family.
On Nell’s death, her grand-daughter, Cassandra, comes into an unexpected inheritance. Cliff Cottage and its forgotten garden are notorious amongst the Cornish locals for the secrets they hold – secrets about the doomed Mountrachet family and their ward Eliza Makepeace, a writer of dark Victorian fairytales. It is here that Cassandra will finally uncover the truth about the family, and solve the century-old mystery of a little girl lost.
Kate Morton New Book/ Kate Morton Latest Book
Kate Morton revealed on her website that she has finished her new book and will be published in September/October 2018. The book is titled ‘The Clockmaker’s Daughter’. The book is set partly in Victorian London and partly inside a big old house called Birchwood Manor, which is tucked within a quiet bend of the Upper Thames.
‘There are secrets and mysteries aplenty and characters to whom I can’t imagine saying goodbye. Giving balance to any sadness I feel at coming to the end of my time with them, is the utter excitement of knowing that soon they will be your friends, too. I am so looking forward to sharing them with you. (I wrote about the incredible magic of reader/writer mind-meeting in my essay for the 10 year anniversary edition of Riverton.)’
Kate Morton Husband
Kate Morton is married to David Patterson , a jazz musician and composer, they have two children.
Kate Morton Instagram
Kate Morton Interview
Interviewer: All of your books start off with children or young adults at the centre of some kind of mystery. What is it that inspires you to start with that child view of the world?
Kate Morton: So much, but for me personally reading as a child was an enormous part of who I am, and I’ve come to believe, I have three children of my own now so I observe them constantly, I’ve come to believe that the things we love in our childhood become a part of us.
The things that we do in our childhood remain a part of us as we grow, and in books like mine where I’m trying to flesh out my character and make them feel real it’s very important to give those people a past, a history. And childhood is that vulnerable part of ourself too, and that can often be a very appealing way into a character.
Interviewer: So much happens to the characters in your book and the plots are so beautifully intricate. How much research do you do to be able to use the details that make those periods seem so real?
Kate Morton: Well I do an awful lot but then that’s a little disingenuous because I absolutely love doing it, so I’m doing it all the time and I choose historical periods that interest me, so the research is no hardship.
In fact I could get easily lost in the research part of book writing, but I do months and months of it,but then I like to almost forget everything that I’ve learned and trust that the important bits, the bits that become real and flesh out the world of my book will rise to the surface.
Interviewer: Tell me about the periods of history that went into The Lake House.
Kate Morton: Well The Lake House is about a little boy that goes missing from a big English country house party on midsummer’s eve in 1933 and no trace is found, despite a thorough police investigation and his family, in devastation and despair, pack up their things and go back to London, never to return.
I chose the 1930s because unlike some periods, like say the world wars where a lot is happening and society is changing very rapidly, I wanted something in the middle that was almost a time of relative peace and tranquility, so that I could depict this beautiful country house and throw a very personal tragedy and just rock the world of my characters, rather than have it set against the backdrop of enormous social and historical change.
Interviewer: What got you writing in the first place?
Kate Morton: I didn’t actually start writing until I was in my early 20s, I was a voracious reader as a child, but it never occurred to me that books were written by people, I don’t know where I thought they came from, it seems a bit daft now, but I had no idea.
Then two chance things happened: A friend had a book published , a real one with pages and a cover, which really impressed me to no end. And my little sister who was 14 at the time handed me a Mills & Boon story that she’d written, and it was really racy for a 14 year old sister to have written, but it had a beginning, and a middle and an end, and I was just so impressed that this story came together.
And these two things got me thinking about stories and the sort of story I might like to tell, and I bought a notebook and started plotting and began typing, and that first day of writing, it was like I was back in
that complete envelopment of stories that I’d experienced when I was a girl and I read.
Interviewer: A lot like your character Alice, in The Lake House..
Kate Morton: Yes, I guess so. Yes (laughs).
Interviewer: You studied theatre as well. Did you think maybe theatre was going to be the path instead of writing?
Kate Morton: Yes I did for a while. I absolutely adore theatre for me there’s no better feeling on earth than that moment when you’re sitting in the theatre and lights are up and everyone’s chatting, and then the house lights go down and there’s that ding-ding-ding as people have to hurry in, and everyone settles in their seat, and there’s that moment of shared anticipation before the curtains draw back and everyone gets taken on the same journey.
For a while I thought that perhaps that’s where my future lay, and I did study theatre but once I started writing I realized that that was another way of telling stories that was probably far more suited to my temperament.
Interviewer: How do you think those theatre studies influence your writing?
Kate Morton: I think I am a very visual person, and when I write I see a goal in my mind, which is I suppose a little like a film or like a theatre set, I do see the characters moving, and I think it’s all grist to the mill in terms of storytelling and narrative and how to bring readers along, and myself too, because I am my first reader really, to keep it interesting to tell the story to make it feel for readers and if the story has sat down beside them and said: “I’m going to tell you this story, you’re not going to believe it, you’re not going to get up until it’s finished.
Interviewer: Which is a big problem with your books, because that’s exactly what happens!
Kate Morton: Good, good, music to my ears! I love preventing people from doing the things they should be doing (laughs).
Interviewer: You set The Lake House in Cornwall and describe it so vividly in the novel, but I believe you didn’t actually visit until you were proofreading the novel?
Kate Morton: That’s right, I had fallen in love with Cornwall from a far, a very long time ago, and when I came to the setting for The Lake House I wanted somewhere where I could have this pristine cultivation of my country house, but where it was never really far from a sort of a much more wild environment and Cornwall is just such a place, it’s so far away from London, and it almost functions like its own island.
It has that sense of history and mystery and myth and magic and enchantment which was perfect, because of course what happened after my family lock their house and leave, 70 years passes before anybody comes back, during which the house is completely overtaken and enveloped by nature, and like a real life sleeping beauty house, just waiting for someone to come and uncover the truth and set it free, so Cornwall was just the perfect place for that.
Interviewer: When you finally got to see it did it live up to your imagination?
Kate Morton: Completely, it was really so surreal it was as if I had stepped into the pages of my own book, it was incredible.
Source: cbc.ca