Kate was born in Glasgow, grew up in Edinburgh, and went to Oxford University. She qualified as a teacher and worked in London, Scotland and Essex. She brought up her family in Oxford and worked for a decade in her local comprehensive, creating a famous poetry project.
She writes in several genres and has won a Forward Prize for poetry, the Saltire Prize, the Writer’s Guild Award for Non-Fiction, The BBC National Short Story Prize and The Orwell Prize for Political Writing. She is currently Writer in Residence at Mansfield College Oxford. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an MBE.
