Creative Minds: Kate Enright would rather take advice from her 10-year-old self

Name: Kate Enright

Place of origin: Perth, Australia

Places lived and worked: Melbourne, London

Pronouns: She/her

CV:

• Senior copywriter, Think HQ
• Copywriter, CHEP
• Writer, Nerd TV
• Copywriter, Time Out London
   

1. How did you end up being a creative?

I responded to a mysterious job ad where you had to send something creative that you’d made. I sent a rap video and ended up with a creative internship.

2. What’s your favourite piece of work in your portfolio?

I did enjoy making a little AI blob called Orb. He definitely has magical, psychic properties.

3. What’s your favourite piece of work created by someone else?

Very early in my career, a mentor told me that Levi’s invented casual Fridays to sell more chinos. That blew my mind. It’s an oldie, but a goodie.

4. What/who are your key creative influences?

Lately I’ve loved reading work by creatives who are non-writers, and work that’s poorly translated. I think it’s because everything I write is so controlled, and picked apart that reading things that aren’t makes me feel free. You have to fill in the blanks yourself, and I don’t interrogate the craft. But that doesn’t really answer the question. Sorry, that’s a secret.

5. Who do you most admire?

I love Tracey Emin because she always says, “I’m sensitive, I’m an artist.” I wish I could say that to clients. Her work connects me to an emotion that’s so complex, intimate, and feminine.

6. What career did you think you’d have when you were a kid?

I used to watch the Victoria Park ranger drive past my primary school in Perth and think “someday, that will be me.”

7. Who’s on your dream dinner guest list (alive or dead)?

I want to eat dinner alone, in peace.

8. Tell us about the worst job you’ve ever had

I got a job off Gumtree (wish I could say it was the first time) writing a comedy opera featuring celebrity lookalikes. I got it because I suggested Putin sang ‘all of my enemies tied up in string, these are a few of my favourite things’ to that song from The Sound of Music. The woman who hired me made me wear glasses with a hidden camera during auditions. She kept bragging about knowing the ‘real’ Simon Cowell and then his lookalike showed up. It was really weird; she made me sign a form that waived ‘all human rights’. I told her I was getting a sandwich and never came back. She still called the next day as if nothing had happened.

9. What advice would you give to 10-year-old you, if you could?

I’d prefer to take advice from my 10-year-old self. That child made a time capsule predicting in the future there’d be more techno music. She was clearly onto something.

10. Tell us about a charity or cause you think needs more attention?

Children’s Ground. Obviously, I think language is everything, and this charity teaches First Nations kids in language and on country.

11. Do you have a nickname? How did you get it?

Enron. The company that went bankrupt in the 90s. It sounds like Enright.