CATRIONA CHILD was born in 1980 in Dundee and spent a great deal of her youth ploughing up and down swimming pools. She has a degree in English from the University of Aberdeen and an MA with distinction in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. She won the Sunday Herald Blog competition in 2007, was shortlisted for the National Library of Scotland/The Scotsman Crime short story competition in 2008 and was published in the Scottish Book Trust Family Legends anthology and the magazine Northwords Now. She has worked as a postie, in a cinema, in a music shop and even had a very short-lived spell selling knickers on a market stall. She lives in Edinburgh with her husband Allan and their fish Speckled Jim.