McLennan, Kathleen V.: - Kathleen V. McLennan loved teaching for 25 years and was a trialling consultant with Thomas Nelson Publishing for the 'Young Australia Language Development Program' 1983 and writing a teaching manual on 'Ideas for Developing Themes' (Thomas Nelson 1983, reprinted 1984.) She changed careers in 1983 to work as an educational journalist and coordinator of Telecom Australia's educational projects, now Telstra. Her work included various media formats announcing the coming changes to education via online learning. She took early retirement due to severe vision impairment but continued to write as a hobby. Now Kathleen works mainly in fiction, collecting stories of ordinary people whose lives never hit the headlines. Many of her stories are fictionalised history but created around actual events and based on real people coping with situations in their pasts. This year Kathleen won third prize in the Mary River Press Short Story Competition for 'Suni and The Boy'. She has won many awards for short stories, poems, and lyrics. Kathleen has twice won the Australian Songwriters' National Award for Best Lyrics, and in the years from 1994-2000, was shortlisted every single year. Recently she won Best Lyrics Award for 'Dreams' from her musical 'Wintersong' and Best Poem, Trentham Words in Winter, for 'Tanjil Bren'.