Cate Kennedy is an Australian writer probably best known for her short stories, but she has also published a novel, poetry collections and non-fiction, and enjoys working in whatever form seems to best fit the ideas that suggest themselves. She lives with her daughter in a small town in regional Victoria, Australia, but also teach on the faculty of the low-residency MFA Creative Writing program at Pacific University in Oregon. She is also immersed in her own PhD, focusing on narrative and empathy. In 2014 she lived for almost a year on the island of Santo, Vanuatu in the South Pacific– a remote, beautiful and challenging experience which she was hoping to incorporate into a work of fiction while at Camargo. 

A lone woman volunteers to maintain a bee quarantine and breeding station on a remote island in an archipelago in the South Pacific. She leaves behind an urban industrialised world for what at first glance - if you can stand the solitude - is an Eden-like paradise. Her epistolary first-person narration will recount what unfolds for her as, sequestered on the island, she watches for signs of colony collapse in the hives, largely oblivious at first to ominous larger global events and environmental shifts operating beyond her horizon which arrive at the shores of her tiny, isolated universe. 

More info: www.penguin.com.au

Cate Kennedy was in residence at the Camargo Foundation in 2017, as part of the Core Program.