Catherine Jinks was born in Brisbane, Queensland, in 1963. She grew up in Papua New Guinea, and later spent four years studying medieval history at the University of Sydney. After graduating, she worked for several years as a journalist before becoming a full-time writer.
Catherine Jinks writes . . .
'ABC Books rang me to inquire if I’d be interested in writing the text for a kind of medieval comic book, like Asterix. I replied that I’d be very interested to produce, not just the text, but the pictures as well — because the fact is that I had always dreamed of publishing my own medieval comic book ... since I was about seven years old I’ve wanted to produce books, whether they were drawn or written ...
I published my first book at the age of 26—it’s called This Way Out. Since then I’ve published seven other children’s novels: Pagan’s Crusade; The Future Trap; Pagan in Exile; Witch Bank; Pagan’s Vows; Pagan’s Scribe and Eye to Eye.
I’ve also published two adult novels, An Evening with Messiah and Little White Secrets. There are some other projects in the works as well—a children’s science fiction novel and a picture book. And of course my cartoon book, The Secret of Hermitage Isle. If you guys out there buy enough of this last one, I’ll be able to give you a whole series of them! ...
Writing is like an iceberg. The visible part (the page) is only about 10% of what goes on in the book. Most of the work is done by your imagination, which needs feeding. I feed my imagination with a lot of music (U2, R.E.M., Peter Gabriel, Enya ...) I also feed it with good films, TV shows, other books, newspaper articles, historical facts, overseas trips, friends’ stories—all of these things can get the creative juices flowing. There’s nothing I like more than a good story.'
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