Our Kate: An Autobiographical Memoir

Catherine Cookson is known and loved for her vibrant and earthy novels set in and around the North-East of England, past and present. Her autobiography makes plain how it is she knows her background and her characters so well.

The Our Kate of the title is not Catherine Cookson, but her mother, around whom the autobiography revolves. Despite her faults, Kate emerges a warm and loveable human figure.

Our Kate is an honest statement about living with hardship and poverty, seen through the eyes of a highly sensitive child and woman, whose zest for life and unquenchable sense of humour won through to make Catherine Cookson the warm, engaging and human writer she is today.

Catherine Cookson was born in Tyne Dock, the illegitimate daughter of a poverty-stricken woman, Kate, whom she believed to be her older sister. She began work in service but eventually moved south to Hastings where she met and married a local grammar-school master. At the age of forty she began writing about the lives of the working-class people with whom she had grown up, using the place of her birth as the background to many of her novels.

Although originally acclaimed as a regional writer - her novel The Round Tower won the Winifred Holtby award for the best regional novel of 1968 - her readership soon began to spread throughout the world. Her novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages and more than 5o,ooo,ooo copies of her books have been sold in Corgi alone. Thirteen of her novels have been made into successful television dramas, and more are planned.

Catherine Cookson's many bestselling novels have established her as one of the most popular of contemporary women novelists. After receiving an OBE in 1985, Catherine Cookson was created a Dame of the British Empire in 1993. She and her husband Tom now live near Newcastle-upon-Tyne.