Kaz Cooke

Kaz Cooke (born Karen Cooke; 17 December 1962) is an Australian author, cartoonist and broadcaster. She has written several bestselling advice books for girls and women, including Real Gorgeous, Up the Duff (also published under different titles outside of Australia), Kidwrangling. Girl Stuff and Women's Stuff, as well as a series of ebooks on women's health topics. Cooke has been a columnist for various Australian newspapers and magazines, including Dolly, The Age, The Australian, Who and The Canberra Times. A collection of her columns, , won the 2002 Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year. In 2008, Girl Stuff won the Australian Publishers Association's General Non-fiction Book of the Year, the Australian Booksellers Association Booksellers' Choice Award, and an honour prize from the Children’s Book Council of Australia.

Kaz Cooke was born and raised in Melbourne. As a teenager she worked in a second-hand bookstore, where she discovered the satirical Nigel Molesworth novels of Geoffrey Willans, illustrated by cartoonist Ronald Searle, and Searle's St Trinian's School cartoons. According to Cooke, they were her 'first, and maybe biggest ever, influences'.

In 2010 Cooke accompanied fellow authors Andy Griffiths and Kate Grenville to the remote Northern Territory community of Manyallaluk, 66 kilometres north-east of Katherine, to work with schoolchildren as part of the Indigenous Literacy Project.

Cooke started as a cadet journalist at The Age in 1981, a month after her 18th birthday, and worked as a junior news reporter in the Age's Sydney bureau in the early 1980s. In 1986 she was the editor of the Age's Friday 'Entertainment Guide' section (now known as 'EG'), then in 1987 she was the features editor of the short-lived Business Daily independent magazine.

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