So, who is Katherine Dolan?

I’m a mystery and travel writer from Dunedin, New Zealand, a city where penguins nap on the beaches. I’ve written about rural New Zealand, distance running in landscapes from Patagonia to the Swiss Jura and life some of the more remote parts of the world – in my previous life as an ESL teacher I worked places like Iraq, East Timor and Kuwait. All of this experience feeds into my writing.

Places and people as inspiration.

Talking to people from around the world, I’ve heard some wild stories. A student said he had to hide in the jungle as a child to avoid being massacred. A colleague described the sensuous process of making her own olive oil in the Jordanian countryside. A friend told me she’d converted to a different religion and had to flee her homeland because her family wanted to kill her for apostasy. True tales like these set fire to the imagination and inspire me to create stories that link the extraordinary to common human experience and emotion.

My life as a reader and writer

Both of my parents were great readers. My mother loves science fiction and my Dad used to read Huckleberry Finn to me and my brothers. So it’s no surprise that I’ve always loved stories. At Otago University, I studied English literature and classical studies and had the privilege of reading The Iliad in Greek. It was there that I met my husband, the brilliant poet, teacher and writer John Dolan. I also started publishing poetry and reviews of others’ writing.

After graduating with a BA and marrying John, I worked as a journalist at Lifestyle magazine in Moscow then, in Auckland, as a feature writer for Fairfax Custom Publishing. In 2006 we emigrated to Canada and, without knowing it, embarked on a peripatetic existence involving lots of teaching, writing, editing and adventure. This gave me time and space to reflect on my experiences of growing up in New Zealand. In 2016, national online newspaper stuff.co.nz published my now-infamous three-part opinion piece on some problematic aspects of life in New Zealand. The series made such a splash that Stuff published an additional article discussing reader responses and another in which readers responded to my assertions of sexism in rural New Zealand.

Persistence is key.

Running is a daily pleasure and most weekends I spend several hours on the trail with nature and a couple of bottles of water. As a runner, writer and life-liver I have one motto and this is KEEP GOING. You might not end up where you intended to go but you will end up somewhere. The authors I most admire are not the ones with one single perfect book, but the ones who wrote constantly and no matter what: Daniel Defoe, P.G. Wodehouse, Philip K. Dick, Georges Simenon and Agatha Christie were all solid workhorses. Travel writers I love include Suzy Kelly, V.S. Naipaul, Jan Morris, Helen Thayer and Dervla Murphy.

Passions and projects

My ultimate goal is to run in the Alps and I hope it will happen one day! I enjoy learning languages and know a little bit of Latin, Greek, Russian and Spanish. I am currently wrestling with Italian. It’s my dream to publish translations of wonderful Italian writers like Marina Morpurgo who are still unknown to anglophone readers. Paradoxically perhaps, another of our goals is to stop travelling and settle down with a couple of dogs. Who knows if that will ever come true!