Lee Cataldi

Cataldi (née Sonnino) was born in Sydney during World War II when, owing to her father’s Italian heritage, she was technically an 'enemy alien'.[1] As a child she lived in Hobart, moving back to Sydney for university. She won the University Medal, publishing her thesis as A Handbook to Sixteenth Century Rhetoric (by Lee A. Sonnino). She studied at Cambridge before meeting her future husband Italian Gianni Cataldi. Since returning to Australia in the 1970s Cataldi has worked as a teacher and a linguist, on Indigenous Australian languages in Halls Creek, Alice Springs and Balgo. In the late sixties she travelled to Italy and England where she became a socialist, inspired by the May 1968 uprising in France.

Cataldi's first book of poems, Invitation to a Marxist lesbian party, was published in 1978, winning the Anne Elder Memorial Prize in that year. Women who live on the ground (1990) received the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Poetry Award; it was also short-listed for the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards. Race against time (1998) won the 1999 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry.[2]

In 1998 Cataldi travelled to Madras, India, for an Asialink Literature Residency.[3]

She currently lives in South Australia.

• Spurr, Barry 1994. The poetry of Lee Cataldi. ISBN 0-646-17733-8

• 6 poems at Thylazine