Children’s book editor, Cate Hogan, is judging the 2022 Page Turner Writing Award in the hope of helping to discover new writers in the children’s genre.
From the boardrooms of Adland to the razzle-dazzle of the Silver Screen, Cate Hogan’s life has been defined by the pursuit of storytelling.
Her parents were ad people. As a kid, she’d sit on their sets amidst the camera crew, lights, and actors, in awe of the fact that all those moving parts would eventually coalesce into a message capable of influencing a million minds. Cate learned the family craft until her mid-twenties, then decided to flip the usual writer’s script of ‘selling out’ to instead leave a cushy job and become a starving artist. Ad campaigns made way for screenplays, and thirty-second messages transformed into hours of action, description, plot, and character development.
Passion and dogged persistence landed Cate a fancy office in the middle of Sydney Harbor and a career most young filmmakers would die for. And it did, in fact, almost kill her. At the tender age of twenty-seven she quit her job and found herself sitting on a beach in Bali, Indonesia. Spiritually, creatively, and physically wrecked, it was the breakdown that would prove to be Cate’s break-through moment, giving her the courage to pursue her love of storytelling, but on her terms.
In the years since, Cate has worked as a freelance developmental editor and helped craft hundreds of fiction and memoir books, including Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Amazon #1 bestsellers that have been translated into dozens of languages around the world.
I will be looking for children's books that find new and compelling ways to bring universal themes to life; themes that reflect the hopes, fears, and interests of a young audience.
