Stella Dorothea Gibbons, novelist, poet and short-story writer, was born in London in 1902. Her first novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932) won the Femina Vie Heuruse Prize for 1933. Amongst her other novels are Miss Linsey and Pa (1936), Nightingale Wood (1938), Westwood (1946), Conference at Cold Comfort Farm (1959) and Beside the Pearly Water (1954). Stella Gibbons died in 1989. Lynne Truss is a writer and journalist. She is the author of the number one bestseller, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which has sold more than two million copies, won the national British Book Award, and was on the New York Times bestseller list or forty-five weeks. She lives in Brighton, England.