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Kate Nicholls is a British author, liberal arts educational consultant and mother of five. She lives in Rome.
For over a decade Kate homeschooled her children in a tented camp in the Okavango Delta, with no electricity or internet, while researching lions. Kate belongs to a theatrical family and enjoyed a successful acting career before choosing to study evolutionary biology. Richard Dawkins mentored her. She moved to Botswana to raise her children in a developing country. She worked for the NGO Women Against Rape before moving into the wilderness to research lions in the Okavango Delta for over a decade. While they were at ‘lion school’ three of her children Travers, Angus and Maisie McNeice wrote about their life among the lions: The Lion Children published by Orion in 2001. All her children graduated to universities in the United States or Europe. Kate’s memoir, set in Botswana and London, Under the Camelthorn Tree was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 2019. Kate lived in Southern Africa for fourteen years.
Returning to Europe, Kate’s passion for lifelong learning led her to establish residential homeschool programmes in London, and to set up an educational consultancy specialising in US college admissions. Kate moved to Italy in 2015 and enjoys supporting homeschool families, guiding creative writing programmes and developing exciting, bespoke homeschool curricula. She listens avidly to podcasts, is a voracious reader and is fascinated by quantum mechanics. Her first novel, The Maternal Element, was published by Salt in June, 2026. She is working on her second novel.
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