Lucy Clark is a journalist and editor with 31 years experience in newspapers and magazines in Sydney, London and New York. She was most recently the editor of the news and opinion website The Hoopla, and has worked as a literary editor, features writer, and opinion columnist. She is now a Senior Editor at Guardian Australia.

A former English teacher, Barbara Hannay is a city-bred girl with a yen for country life. Many of her forty-plus books are set in rural and outback Australia and have been enjoyed by readers around the world.

She has won the RITA, awarded by Romance Writers of America, and has twice won the Romantic Book of the Year award in Australia.

In her own version of life imitating art, Barbara and her husband currently live on a misty hillside in beautiful Far North Queensland where they keep heritage pigs and chickens and an untidy but productive garden.

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!