Cathie Tasker is a fiction editor with over 25 years’ experience. She has mentored many manuscripts to publication and guided and motivated countless writers to develop their work.
Cathie works as a tutor for the Australian Writers’ Centre and in freelance editing and project management, notably for Magabala Books. She has worked as an editor and publisher with HarperCollins, Scholastic Australia and Koala Books. She also worked as Marketing Manager for Koala Books and as a Book Club Editor at Scholastic Australia. In her career, Cathie has edited and commissioned about 800 books, many of which went on to become bestsellers and win awards.
Cathie has edited novels and picture books for dozens of authors, including Bruce Pascoe, Nat Amoore, Charmaine Ledden-Lewis, Dub Leffler, Jackie French, Wendy Orr, Garth Nix, Mem Fox, Cathy Wilcox, Bruce Whatley, Jennifer Fallon, Garry Disher, and three Australian Writers’ Centre presenters: Pamela Freeman, Judith Rossell and Sue Whiting.
She has judged and convened panels for numerous literary awards including the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Book of the Year awards, the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, the Aurealis Awards, and IBBY (International Board on Books for Young People). Cathie also updated the Australasian entries for The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (2nd ed, 2015).