Laurence Fearnley is an award-winning novelist. Her novel The Hut Builder won the fiction category of the 2011 NZ Post Book Awards. In 2014 her novel Reach was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, and, in 2008, Edwin and Matilda was runner-up in the fiction category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Her second novel, Room, was shortlisted for the 2001 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. In 2004 Fearnley was awarded the Artists to Antarctica Fellowship and in 2007 the Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago. In 2016 she won the NZSA/ Janet Frame Memorial Award and in 2017 she was the joint winner of the Landfall essaycompetition. She was named a New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate in 2019. She lives in Dunedin.
In Scented, our protagonist Siân, fascinated by the art of perfumery from childhood and recently made redundant from her job, decides to build her signature scent note by note in an effort to better understand her identity.