About Kaz

kaz.jpg Kaz Cooke is Australia’s #1 trusted advisor for girls and women. Her books have sustained two generations of Australian women with useful info and advice, backed by expert medical and other consultants – delivered in a fun, friendly way. Award-winning and best-selling books include Up The Duff (The Real Guide to Pregnancy), Kidwrangling (Looking After Babies, Toddlers and Preschoolers), Girl Stuff (Your Full-On Guide to the Teen Years) and Women's Stuff. Kaz’s work is also available in eBook and app form.

Kaz’s career spans more than 30 years of journalism, writing columns, cartooning, radio shows, book publishing, public speaking and eating toast. She lives with her family in Melbourne. Visit her official Facebook page or follow on her on Twitter @reallykazcooke, and check out her official site here.

If you want to make a professional enquiry please contact:

TOKEN ARTISTS
Collingwood, VIC,
Australia 3065
Telephone +61 3 9417 4700
zoe@token.com.au

If you want to contact Kaz Cooke about one of her books, please write to:

PENGUIN PUBLICITY
publicity@au.penguingroup.com

Books by Kaz Cooke

Kaz's thoughts on her work:

"I'm not a guru with a religious or New-Age 'theory of life' to share with everybody. I haven't spent a year in Tuscany cooking my own broth, knitting my own ankle boots out of rare lavender species and refusing to buy toilet paper. No, indeedy. I'm a person who usually approaches any new situation with a base knowledge of nearly nought. I am remarkably, stunningly clueless in many directions.

If I'm an expert in anything, it's admitting that I know nothing and then trying to find an expert and some reliable sources to help me. Armed only with my main qualifications of vast ignorance and curiosity, some research skills, the ability to beg clever people for bags of help and some jokes to keep it all amusing, I wrote my books Up The Duff (about pregnancy), Kidwrangling (about looking after babies to preschoolers) and Girl Stuff (for teenagers).

When I left school I went to work as a kind of apprentice reporter, called a 'cadet journalist'. I learned to overcome my shyness and ask for help in understanding something because I represented the reader who needed to be informed. To this day, I'm still amazed at how generous people are if you just rock up and start asking them questions, or request some help in understanding something.

I wish I'd known, as a young woman, how to relate to my body, how to develop a belief system, what to think about before deciding whether to try to get pregnant, how to break up, how to recognise and avoid financial scams, how not to repeat family patterns in grown-up relationships, and which mental and physical health symptoms to look out for and how to 'fix' or manage them.

So researching books like this is also building a knowledge base for me. I wanted info that was independent of what somebody's trying to sell us. And independent of somebody else's fervently held but rather bonkity and unsupported opinion. I want us women to have independent, practical and useful info that’s untainted by commercialism, stuff that will make us feel smarter and healthier, and more gorgeous, confident and optimistic."

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