Elizabeth Smither is a prize-winning poet. Her collection The Lark Quartet won the Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry in 2000, and in 2002 she was the Te Mata New Zealand Poet Laureate. More recently, in 2008, she was awarded the prestigious Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry. Smither has written four previous novels – First Blood (1983), Brother-love, Sister-love (1986), The Sea Between Us (2003) and Different Kinds of Pleasure (2006) – and five collections of short stories, the most recent being The Girl Who Proposed (2008).
