Beverley Farmer (1941-2018) was born in Melbourne. After graduating from the University of Melbourne she worked in the restaurant trade and taught English and French in secondary schools. In 1965 she married a Greek migrant and they went to live, for three years, under the Junta in his parents’ village on the Macedonian plain north of Thessaloniki. While there she wrote her first book, Alone (1980). Several of the stories in the collections Milk (1983) and Home Time (1985) draw on her experience of Greece, as does her novel The House in the Light (UQP 1995). She lives on the Victorian coast, the setting for A Body of Water (UQP 1990) and The Seal Woman (UQP 1992). Her latest book is Collected Stories (UQP 1996) and her latest passion, black-and-white photography. Beverley also had a story included in The Gift of Story (UQP 1998), a collection of short stories demonstrating the range of talented Australian short story writers published by UQP.