Jennie Lucas's parents owned a bookstore and she grew up surrounded by books, dreaming about faraway lands.

At twenty-two she met her future husband and after their marriage, she graduated from university with a degree in English. She started writing books a year later.

Jennie won the Romance Writers of America’s Golden Heart contest in 2005 and hasn’t looked back since.

Trish always fancied herself a writer, but she dutifully picked gherkins and washed dishes in a Chinese restaurant on her way to earning herself an economics degree and a qualification as a chartered accountant instead. Work took her to Canberra where she promptly fell in love with a tall, dark and handsome hero who cut computer code, and marriage and four daughters followed, which gave Trish the chance to step back from her career and think about what she'd really like to do.

Writing romantic fiction was at the top of the list, so Trish made a choice and followed her heart. It was the right choice. Since then, she's sold more than thirty titles to Harlequin with sales in excess of seven million globally, with her books printed in more than thirty languages in forty countries worldwide. Four times nominated and two times winner of Romance Writers of Australia's RuBY Award for Romantic Book of the Year, Trish was also a 2012 RITA finalist in the US.

Robyn Grady has sold millions of books worldwide, and features regularly on bestsellers lists and at award ceremonies, including The National Readers Choice, The Booksellers Best and Australia's prestigious Romantic Book of the Year. When she's not tapping out her next story, she enjoys the challenge of raising three very different daughters as well as dreaming about shooting the breeze with Stephen King during a month-long Mediterranean cruise.

They say you can take someone who was born in Africa out of the bush but you can't take the bush out of someone born there…

Lindsay Armstrong was born in South Africa. She grew up with three ambitions: to become a writer, to travel the world, and to be a game ranger.

She didn't achieve the last one, but her fascination for wildlife and that special something about Africa and its big game still remains with her. When she went to work it was in travel, at an agency and an airline, and this started her on the road to seeing the world.

She met her New Zealand-born husband, who had been working in West Africa, when he was on his way home through Johannesburg. He did go home but in a matter of weeks he was back in South Africa, and six months later they were married. Three of their five children were born in South Africa. Then one in London and one in Australia, after they made the decision to emigrate from South Africa.

It wasn't until her youngest child started school that Lindsay sat down at the kitchen table determined to tackle her other ambition — to stop dreaming about writing and do it!

She hasn't stopped since. She's not happy unless she has a book under way, and she's discovered she can write through just about anything.

She and her husband have moved around a lot. They've trained racehorses, farmed, and lived on their boat for six months while they sailed it from the Gold Coast to the Torres Strait and back, an epic voyage! They currently live in Queensland, overlooking the water; they sold their farm, and they're looking around for another boat.

Lindsay and her husband love to travel and have been back to Africa twice in the past few years. The highlight of one of their trips was a visit to the Serengeti, in Tanzania, where Lindsay did the one thing she swore she would never do: take a ride in a hot-air balloon. She was a nervous wreck as the balloon tottered upright, but will remember it as a unique experience to see the game spreading out on the Serengeti plain beneath her as the sun rose.

Despite this passion for wildlife and Africa, Lindsay considers Australia her home now and loves the country. She travelled to Sydney to witness the closing weekend of the Olympic Games in September 2000; it made her proud to be an Aussie!

Nikki Logan lives amongst a string of wetlands in Australia with her partner and a menagerie of animals. Her stories are full of romance in descriptive, natural environments.

She believes the richness and danger of wild places perfectly mirror the passion and risk of falling in love. Nikki authored her first romance on a sabbatical from work. Determined to be published by forty, her first book hit shelves in February 2010, her fortieth year, and she hasn't looked back since.,