Kaz Cooke

Kaz Cooke (born Karen Cooke; 17 December 1962) is an Australian author, cartoonist and broadcaster. She has written several bestselling advice books for girls and women, including ''Real Gorgeous'', ''Up the Duff'' (also published under different titles outside of Australia), ''Kidwrangling''. ''Girl Stuff'' and ''Women's Stuff'', as well as a series of ebooks on women's health topics. Cooke has been a columnist for various Australian newspapers and magazines, including '' Dolly'', ''The Age'', ''The Australian'', ''Who'' and ''The Canberra Times''. A collection of her columns, '' Living with Crazy Buttocks'', won the 2002 Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year. In 2008, ''Girl Stuff'' won the Australian Publishers Association's General Non-fiction Book of the Year, the Australian Booksellers Association Nielsen BookData Booksellers' Choice Award, and an honour prize from the Children’s Book Council of Australia.

Life

Kaz Cooke was born and raised in Melbourne. As a teenager she worked in a second-hand bookstore, where she discovered the satirical Nigel Molesworth novels of Geoffrey Willans, illustrated by cartoonist Ronald Searle, and Searle's St Trinian's School cartoons. According to Cooke, they were her "first, and maybe biggest ever, influences".

In 2010 Cooke accompanied fellow authors Andy Griffiths and Kate Grenville to the remote Northern Territory community of Manyallaluk, 66 kilometres north-east of Katherine, to work with schoolchildren as part of the Indigenous Literacy Project.

Journalism

Cooke started as a cadet journalist at ''The Age'' in 1981, a month after her 18th birthday, and worked as a junior news reporter in the ''Age'''s Sydney bureau in the early 1980s. In 1986 she was the editor of the Age's Friday 'Entertainment Guide' section (now known as 'EG'), then in 1987 she was the features editor of the short-lived Business Daily independent magazine.

Articles by Cooke appeared in the 1980s in '' Dolly'', '' The Australian Women’s Weekly'' and ''Cleo''. In the late 1980s she began writing an etiquette column for ''The Age'' called 'Keep Yourself Nice'. In the 1990s she had a regular column in the '' Weekend Australian Magazine'' and a satirical gossip column in ''Who'' magazine. In the 2000s she wrote about television for ''The Canberra Times'', and occasional opinion pieces for various other publications.

Cartoons

Cooke's early cartoons appeared in ''The Cane Toad Times'', ''The Eye'', ''The National Times'' and other independent newspapers. In 1984 she created the cartoon character 'Hermoine the modern girl’, who first appeared in ''The Eye'' and then in the late 1980s as a weekly feature in the '' Sunday Age'' and ''Sydney Morning Herald''. In 1988 Cooke compiled cartoons about Aboriginal people and racism by various cartoonists for ''Beyond a Joke: An Anti-Bicentenary Cartoon Book'' (published by McPhee Gribble/Penguin Books

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