Growing up in rural New Zealand, AJ Lancaster hid up trees reading books till someone else brought the cows home. She wrote in the same way she breathed—constantly and without thinking much of it—so it took many years and accumulating a pile of manuscripts for her to realise that she might want to be a writer and, in fact, already was. On the way to this realisation she collected a degree in science, worked in environmental planning, and became an editor. - AJ Lancaster