Elizabeth Bevarly

Elizabeth Bevarly was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.A.. Her grandmothers, Ruth Bevarly and Hazel Robinson went her models to follow. She says: "Both women lived in times when women were viewed as weak, fragile creatures, yet both of them were strong, forceful women who struggled to overcome poverty and hardship. They were anything but weak or fragile." She wrote her first novel when she was twelve years old. It was 32 pages long-and that was with college rule notebook paper-and featured three girls named Liz, Marianne and Cheryl, who explored the mysteries of a haunted house. Her friends Marianne and Cheryl proclaimed it "Brilliant! Spellbinding! Kept me up past dinnertime reading!" Those rave reviews only kindled the fire inside her to write more.

Elizabeth earned her B.A. with honours in English from the University of Louisville in 1983. Although she never wanted to be anything but a novelist, her career detours before making the leap to writing included stints working in movie theatres, restaurants, boutiques and major department stores. She also spent time as an editorial assistant for a medical journal, where she learned the correct spellings and meanings of a variety of words (like microscopy and histological) that she will never ever use again.

Finally, in 1989, she sold her first novel, Destinations South, to Silhouette Books. Since then, she has gone on to sell more than 30 novels and six novellas to five different publishers. Her books have appeared on a number of bestseller lists, including the USA Today bestseller list. She's been nominated for several Romantic Times awards. She was recently given a Career Achievement Award from Romantic Times magazine for Series Love and Laughter, and her Silhouette Desire, The Perfect Father was awarded the National Readers' Choice Award in 1996. Her novels have been published in 19 languages and more than two dozen countries. There are more than five million copies of her books in print worldwide.

Elizabeth is married with a member of the Coast Guard, and they had a son in 1995. "My husband and I met when we were teenagers, and back then, our idea of romance was necking in the back seat of his Pontiac Firebird. My husband was stationed in San Juan, Puerto Rico with the Coast Guard when we married, and that whole period of our life was so idyllic. It's just a wonderful city all around. When we were living as newlyweds, romance was sitting on the beach at sunset, holding hands and listening to a live salsa band. Now, with a young child, romance is having our son at my mum's for the night, so that we can rent a movie and watch it by candlelight with a nice bottle of Pinot Grigio." She has claimed as residences Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C., northern Virginia and southern New Jersey, but she now resides with her husband and young son in her native Kentucky, where she fully intends to remain. When she's not writing, Elizabeth enjoys old film, old houses, good books, fine antiques and salsa music, and she has a tendency to rescue abandoned animals. Both of her cats, Quito (named after a bar on Tortola) and Wallo (named by her then-two-year-old son for reasons she and her husband will never understand) are refugees the first from a rest area beside a main road, and the other from a park near where she used to live.