Katharine Susannah Prichard (4 December 1883 – 2 October 1969) was an Australian author and co-founding member of the Communist Party of Australia.

Prichard moved with her husband, war hero Hugo "Jim" Throssell, VC, to Greenmount, Western Australia, in 1920 and lived at 11 Old York Road for much of the rest of her life.

Although she had frequent arguments with other Communist writers such as Frank Hardy and Judah Waten over the correct application of the doctrine of socialist realism to Australian fiction, she remained supportive of the Soviet Union and its cultural policies when many other intellectuals, such as Eric Lambert and Stephen Murray-Smith, left the party in the 1950s.

Her public position as a communist and a female writer saw her harassed by Western Australian police and the federal government throughout her life.

She was the subject of constant rumours and frequent anonymous tip offs to Western Australian police of any communist activity.

[6] Her two major novels, which were to give her national and international prominence, written in Western Australia in the early years of her marriage, were Working Bullocks (1926)[7][8] which dramatised the physical and emotional traumas of timber workers in the karri country of Australia's south-west, and Coonardoo (1929),[9][10] a novel which became notorious for its candid portrayal of relationships between white men and Australian Aboriginal women in the north-west.

Her autobiography Subtle Flame, published a few years before her death, exhibited the complex legacy she left behind[20] Prichard died at her home in Greenmount in 1969.

He had fought for many years to clear his name, after being accused of passing classified information to his mother, or actively spying for the Soviet Union.