Catherine McCullagh

Catherine McCullagh grew up in Tasmania with a love of bushwalking, reading and history. She trained as a teacher before embarking on a career in the Australian Army, eventually leaving to establish herself as a freelance editor, primarily in military history. Fifteen years later, inspired by the extraordinary stories in which she had become immersed, she launched a new career as a writer. Her first published works were non-fiction, beginning with Willingly into the Fray, a centenary history of Australian Army nursing, which was followed by War Child, a wartime memoir she ghost-wrote with Annette Janic. Her third non-fiction volume, Unconquered, which she co-wrote with Denny Neave and Gordon Traill, tells the remarkable stories of a group of competitors at the 2018 Invictus Games.

Catherine’s first historical novel, Dancing with Deception, was published in 2017 and was followed by Secrets and Showgirls in 2021 and Love and Retribution in 2022. Her third novel, Resistance and Revenge (2023), marked a foray into alternate history. Power and Obsession was the second of her alternate history novels and was followed by a sequel, Murder and Masquerade, which is also a stand-alone novel in its own right, and was released in late 2025.