Lila Richards lives in a seaside suburb of Christchurch, New Zealand, where she shares her home with Merlin the cat (or perhaps the other way round). She works part-time as a sub-editor for the New Zealand Meteorological Service, and runs a small proofreading and editing business. As well as writing, Lila reads eclectically, sews and embroiders, dotes on her grandchildren, and collects things, her particular favourites being old movies, owls, and tacky clocks (a surprisingly abundant species). From time to time she enters the Middle Ages via the Society for Creative Anachronism (an international medieval re-creation group) where she transmogrifies into a ninth-century smallholder's widow from the west of Ireland, and has attained the rank of Baroness.