Miranda Lee was born at Port Macquarie, a popular seaside town on the Mid-North Coast of New South Wales, Australia, and is the youngest of four children. Her father was a country school teacher and brilliant sportsman. Her mother was a talented dressmaker. When Miranda was ten, her father was transferred to Gosford, another coastal town in the countryside, much closer to Sydney. After leaving her convent school, she briefly studied the cello before moving to Sydney, where she embraced the emerging world of computers. Her career as a programmer ended after she married, had three daughters and bought a small acreage in a semi-rural community. Following this, she attempted greyhound training, as well as horse and goat breeding, but was left dissatisfied. Miranda yearned to find a creative career from which she could earn money. When her sister suggested writing romances, it seemed like a good idea. She could do it at home, and it might even be fun! It took a decade of trial and error before her first romance, After the Affair, was accepted and published. At that time, Miranda, her husband Tony, and her three daughters had moved back to the Central Coast, where they could enjoy the sun and the surf lifestyle once again. Not long into her writing career, Miranda committed herself to writing a six-book series entitled, The Hearts of Fire, with a deadline of just nine short months. Bravely, her husband left his executive position to stay home and support Miranda’s writing career. He learned to cook and to clean, two invaluable household skills. Numerous successful stories followed, each embodying Miranda’s trademark style: pacy and sexy rhythms; passionate, real-life characters; and enduring, memorable story lines. She has one credo when writing romances: Don’t bore the reader! Millions of fans world-wide agree she never does. Miranda was the sister of the late author, Emma Darcy.

Helen Shirley was born on February 20 1939 in New Zealand, where she grew up, an only child possessed by a vivid imagination and a love for reading. She wrote stories for amusement in her early teenage years, and when she left leaving school, she took a secretarial job at a father-and-son legal firm. At age twenty-one Helen joined a girlfriend and embarked on a working holiday in Australia, travelling via cruise ship from Auckland to Melbourne. Alas, no shipboard romance, as she spent all four days in her cabin suffering from sea-sickness! After fifteen months working in Melbourne, Helen and her friend bought a vehicle and took three months to drive the length and breadth of Australia, choosing to work in Cairns in order to fund the final leg of our journey to Sydney. It was in Cairns that Helen met her future husband, Danilo Bianchin, an Italian immigrant from Treviso. He was a tobacco sharefarmer from the tobacco farming community of Mareeba. His English was pitiful, and her command of Italian was nil. Six months later they married, and Helen was flung into cooking for up to nine tobacco pickers, stringing tobacco, feeding 200 chickens, a few turkeys, ducks... plus killing, cleaning and cooking the same! Her knowledge of Italian improved, and there were hilarious moments in retrospect. Some of what she endured was cooking on a wood-burning stove, having no running hot water, a primitive shower and toilet facilities, washing uniforms for two soccer teams during the soccer season... floods, horrendous hailstone damage to tobacco crops, hardship, and the stillbirth of their first child. Then, to their joy, Helen's daughter, Lucia, was born. Three years later the couple returned to New Zealand, where they settled for sixteen years. During those early years, they added two sons, Angelo and Peter, to the family. With multiple anecdotes of farm life in an Italian community to friends, the idea of writing a book occurred. A romance, set on a tobacco farm in Australia's far north, Queensland, featuring an Italian hero. Helen says, "the background was authentic, believe me!" However the hero was rich and owned the farm artistic license! It took her a year to complete a passable manuscript, typed on a portable typewriter at the dining room table. That first effort was deemed too short with insufficient detail. Helen rewrote it. This time it was considered too long with too much extraneous detail. She revised, then sent it to London. Four months later she received a telegram from Alan Boon (Mills & Boon) to say they intended to publish and a contract would be sent in the mail. It was the most wonderful news! Helen wrote ten more books while living in New Zealand, then in 1981, her family resettled in Australia, on Queensland's Gold Coast. She has since published twenty-five more books. Today, with computer technology, the mechanics of writing are much easier. However, the writing process doesn't change. Helen says that she's having a good day if she can achieve 5 good pages, which she is likely to change, edit and rewrite the following day. She loves creating characters, giving them life and providing a situation where their emotions are tested and love wins out. For her, the greatest praise is for a reader to say they couldn't put the book down... then Helen knows that she has achieved what she set out to do — "create a moving enjoyable story which holds the reader entertained from beginning to end." Helen's hobbies are tennis, table-tennis, judo, reading. She loves movies, and leads an active social life.

I was told off as a child for making up stories—little did I know that one day I’d earn my living by writing them! To the horror of my parents, I left school at sixteen and held a bewildering variety of jobs: I was a London DJ (in the now-trendy Primrose Hill), a decorator and a singer. After that I became a cook, a photographer and, eventually, a nurse. I waitressed in the south of France, drove an ambulance in Australia, saw lots of beautiful sights but could never settle down. Everywhere I went I felt like a square peg—until one day I started writing again and then everything just fell into place. I felt like Cinderella must have when the glass slipper fit! Today, I have the best job in the world, writing passionate romances for Harlequin. I like writing stories which are sexy and fast-paced, yet packed full of emotion—stories that readers will identify with, laugh and cry along with. My interests are many and varied—chocolate and music, fresh flowers and bubble baths, films, cooking and trying to keep my home from looking burglarized! Simple pleasures—you can’t beat them! I live in Winchester, one of the most stunning cities in the world, but don’t take my word for it—come see for yourself! I regularly visit London and Paris. Oh, and I love hearing from my readers all over the world…so I think it’s over to you!