Elizabeth Kata

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Elizabeth Colina Katayama (née McDonald; 9 October 1912 – 4 September 1998), better known by her pen name Elizabeth Kata, was an Australian writer. Born in Sydney to Scottish parents, she married Japanese pianist Shinshiro Katayama in 1937 and lived in Japan for about ten years. During the last years of World War II she was interned at the mountain resort town of Karuizawa, Nagano. She returned to Australia in 1947 with her baby son David after a long struggle to stay.

Kata wrote novels, television scripts, and some Hollywood screenplays. Her first novel, Be Ready with Bells and Drums (written in 1959, published in 1961), was adapted into the 1965 film A Patch of Blue, directed by Guy Green. Green’s screenplay received a Writers Guild of America nomination. After the film’s success, the novel was reissued under the title A Patch of Blue and for many years was included on school reading lists in the United States and Australia.

A 2010 book, Mrs Katayama and Her Splash of Blue by Independence Jones, tells how her first book became the film. Elizabeth Kata died in Sydney in 1998 at the age of 85.