About

A woman smiles while slightly turned. She is wearing all black.

Taken at the NGV in 2024 by the Embassy of France.

Katerina Bryant is a writer based on Kaurna land (Adelaide, Australia). Her first book, Hysteria: A Memoir of Illness, Strength and Women’s Stories Throughout History (NewSouth), was published in 2020. You can buy it at your local independent bookstore or here.

Katerina’s work has appeared in The Guardian, Meanjin, Griffith Review and Kill Your Darlings, amongst others. You can read some of it here.

Her essays have been shortlisted for the 2016 Scribe Nonfiction Prize for Young Writers, 2018 Feminartsy Memoir Prize, 2019 The Lifted Brow and non/fictionLab Prize for Experimental Nonfiction and the 2022 Hardie Grant and RMIT Spark Prize. Her work is also in the collections Balancing Acts: Women in Sport and Raging Grace: Australian Writers Speak Out on Disability.

Katerina has been a part of the Feminist Writers Festival, Melbourne Writers Festival, Emerging Writers’ Festival, National Young Writers Festival, Noted Festival and the Digital Writers’ Festival. She was also the inaugural recipient of the 2018 Writers SA Varuna Fellowship for Emerging Writers where she developed an essay collection about the lives of animals.

Katerina completed her PhD, a hybrid memoir/biography of the first woman clown in America, in 2022. She is currently a SA Literary Fellow at the State Library of South Australia, working on a manuscript about women and chess.