Kat Clay is an ENNIE and ARPIA award-winning author of tabletop roleplaying games from Melbourne, Australia. Her Call of Cthulhu games, The Hammersmith Haunting, Resort, and The Well of All Fear, are bestsellers on DriveThruRPG. The Well of All Fear won the silver ENNIE in 2024 for Best Community Content, and was nominated for Best Adventure – Short Form. Resort, won Best Scenario at the 2025 Australian Roleplaying Industry Awards.
She is a member of the Call of Cthulhu editorial team at legendary game publisher Chaosium. Her work includes the Encyclopedia Cthulhiana and the re-issue of classic board game Credo: The Game of Duelling Dogmas.
Alongside her game writing, she is a published fiction author and reviewer. Her short stories have been published in Interzone, Cosmic Horror Monthly, Midnight Echo, Translunar Travelers Lounge, Aurealis, SQ Mag, and Crimson Streets. In 2018, her crime story ‘Lady Loveday Investigates‘ won three prizes at the national Scarlet Stiletto Awards, including the Kerry Greenwood Prize for Best Malice Domestic. Her weird-noir novella Double Exposure, was published by Crime Factory in 2015.
Kat’s essays and criticism have been published in The Guardian, Interzone, The Victorian Writer, Literary Traveler, Travel Weekly, Matador Network, and Weird Fiction Review. She was a contributor to the Locus winning and Hugo nominated Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985, with her essay on Judith Merrill.
She has twice received the Ditmar Award for Best Fan Writer, acknowledging her contributions to Australian fandom through her blog and YouTube channel. In 2026, she was the Virtual Writer in Residence at the Estonian Literary Museum, through the Melbourne UNESCO Cities of Literature program.
She has a grand passion for experimental, collaborative, and interactive storytelling. It’s why she loves games, especially RPGs, TTRPGs, detective games, and most things that fall under ‘choices-matter’.
Kat holds undergraduate degrees in Media Arts and International Studies, along with a Graduate Diploma in Creative Writing from UTS. She spent a year studying at the Universite de Poitiers in France, which is where she discovered Margaret Atwood, Enki Bilal, and Sailor Moon, and read a stupid amount of Patricia Cornwell novels.
Awards
- WINNER – 2025 Australian Industry Roleplaying Awards – Best Scenario, Resort
- WINNER – 2024 ENNIE Awards – Best Community Content Silver Award, The Well of All Fear
- SHORTLISTED – 2024 ENNIE Awards – Best Adventure Short Form, The Well of All Fear
- WINNER – 2022 Ditmar Awards – Best Fan Writer
- SHORTLISTED – 2022 Scarlet Stiletto Awards – He’s a Good Man
- WINNER – 2021 Ditmar Awards – Best Fan Writer
- WINNER -2018 Scarlet Stiletto Awards – The Sun Bookshop Third Prize, The Kerry Greenwood Malice Domestic, The Athenaeum Library Body in the Library Runner-Up, Lady Loveday Investigates
- LONGLISTED – 2018 CWA Debut Dagger Award – Victorianoir
- HONORABLE MENTION – 2017 AHWA Shadows Award – Non-fiction & criticism
- SHORTLISTED – 2017 Aurealis Awards – Best horror story – Reef