Kathryn Bonella is an Australian journalist and bestselling true crime author whose work has taken her deep inside worlds of crime, prisons and international drug trafficking.
After studying journalism at RMIT in Melbourne, Kathryn moved to London, where she worked across print and television, before returning to Australia to become a producer with 60 Minutes. It was while covering the Schapelle Corby case for the program that she was offered the opportunity to co-write Schapelle Corby: My Story. The book went straight to number one.
Bali became an important setting in Kathryn’s books. Her research took her inside Kerobokan Prison and, later, into the island’s hidden drug world, bringing her into contact with prisoners, police, criminals and surfers turned international drug traffickers whose stories were rarely heard from the inside.
Kathryn’s books draw on extensive interviews, court material, police sources and firsthand reporting to reconstruct those worlds in extraordinary detail. Her access to the people at the centre of the stories has become a defining feature of her work, revealing not only what happened, but how people entered these worlds, lived within them and dealt with the consequences.
Her books include Hotel K / Hotel Kerobokan, Snowing in Bali and Operation Playboy, as well as Schapelle Corby: My Story / No More Tomorrows. They have become international bestsellers and been published around the world.