About Katrina
Katrina has been a doctor, a researcher and now a writer. She was at university in the 1970s and was a regular at all the demos. She became a doctor, specialized as a gastroenterologist and was awarded a Harkness Fellowship to work at Harvard University for 2 years.
The little flame of activism would not go out, and on return to Australia she continued to work with disadvantaged people, including a year as a volunteer doctor in the Pacific Islands.
Life changed in her early forties when she was a single mum of four children, and out of the blue, was told she had Parkinson’s disease. Katrina had to retire much earlier than she’d planned. She knew she had a few stories to tell, starting with her debut novel ‘The Bones’, and now has completed her second novel.
She’s won, or been short-listed for, a number of literary prizes including the Allan Marshall prize, the Roly Sussex Prize and the Federation of Australian Writers AJ Natoli Prize. She’s been the recipient of a fellowship to Varuna (the Writers’ House in NSW), and has appeared at writers’ festivals. She’s also been on radio on desert island discs several times- different radio stations, different music each time!
Most recently she was runner-up in the well-known Sisters in Crime short story competition, ‘The Scarlet Stilettos’. Katrina’s story was entered in the ‘Body in the Library’ section of the competition and was also been awarded a UNESCO city of literature virtual residency in Edinburgh, Scotland.”
Her stories have been published in a number of anthologies, including ‘Stories from the Suburbs’, ‘Write Now!’, ‘2020 Vision’ (which she co-edited and co-published), and ‘Scarlet Stilettos – The Sixteenth Cut’.
Katrina received an Order of Australia (OAM) in 2018 for services to medicine.
Dr Katrina Watson chats about her career as a gastroenterologist, her life and her new book ‘The Bones’ – 2nd March 2024

