Lucy Sussex comes from Christchurch, New Zealand, and lectures at La Trobe University. She has edited four anthologies of short fiction. Her award-winning work includes five books for younger readers and the novel, The Scarlet Rider (1996). She has written the short story collections, My Lady Tongue (1988), A Tour Guide in Utopia (1995), and Absolute Uncertainty (2001). Currently she has a weekly review column in The Age. She has published Women Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction (2010) and an anthology of Victorian writing, Saltwater in the Ink (2010).