The Secret River

Kate Grenville was born in Sydney on October 14, 1950. She is a graduate of the University of Sydney with a BA (Honours), the University of Colorado with a MA and a PhD in Creative Arts from the University of Technology, Sydney. She is one of Australia's best-known authors. She is the winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She will be at the Oz, New Zealand festival of literature and arts program in London in 2015. She also made the Indie Awards 2016 shortlists in the Nonfiction category with her title One Life. Diana Athill was born in England on December 21, 1917. She was educated at Oxford University. During World War II, she as a researcher with the BBC. She worked as an editor at Allan Wingate and then at André Deutsch. Athill started writing autobiography in her early 40s. Her memoir, Instead of a Letter, was published in 1962. Her other memoirs included After a Funeral; Make Believe; Alive, Alive Oh!; Stet; Yesterday Morning; and A Florence Diary. Somewhere Towards the End won a Costa Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other works included a volume of short stories entitled An Unavoidable Delay and a novel entitled Don't Look at Me Like That. She was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 2009. She died on January 23, 2019 at the age of 101.