Lisa Birnie worked for thirty years as a newspaper reporter in Melbourne, London, San Francisco and Vancouver and was a contributing editor to the magazine Saturday Night. She has written ten books, which include a New York Times best-selling title, and won numerous prizes including a Ford Foundation Fellowship to Stanford University, the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize, and a Gold from the Canadian National Magazine Foundation. Lisa was a writer-in-residence at Monash University in Melbourne and currently lives in Vancouver, BC. She is eighty-one years old and sees no reason to stop writing.