Olga Wojtas was born and brought up in Edinburgh where she attended James Gillespie s High School the model for Marcia Blaine School for Girls, which appears in Muriel Spark s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She was encouraged to write by an inspirational English teacher there, Iona M. Cameron. Olga won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2015 and has had more than 30 short stories published in magazines and anthologies.