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.
Journalism 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. Of her cartoons, Cooke said in a
geekgirl interview in 1996: "I’m learning to get a whole lot better at making stuff happen on computer, but I still really love drawing in old-fashioned pen and a bottle of the blacker-than-black waterproof ink – delicious." In c.1996–97 she wrote a weekly column in the
Sydney Morning Herald’s '
Good Weekend’ magazine, whose illustrations she described as "bizarrely incongruous photographic vignettes of famous people such as Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Diana as joke self-portraits", while in 1999 she returned to using her own cartoons to illustrate her weekly column in
The Australian. In 1997 she released a calendar printed on "paper" made from sugarcane pulp. == Works ==