The Secret Vineyard

For her bestselling novels The Girl in Steel-Capped Boots, The Girl in the Hard Hat and The Girl in the Yellow Vest, Loretta Hill drew upon her own outback engineering experiences of larrikins, red dust and steel-capped boots. She is also the author of The Maxwell Sisters, The Grass is Greener and The Secret Vineyard, and the ebook novellas Operation Valentine and One Little White Lie, which was a no.1 bestseller on iTunes.

Loretta always wanted to be a writer. As a kid she filled pages of exercise books with stories to amuse her friends. Her father, who never wasted his time on fiction, didn't see much worth in this pass time and pushed her to pursue a 'sensible' career. Fortunately, she had inherited some of his talent for numbers and decided to give it a go. She graduated from the University of Western Australia as structural engineer and took her first job with a major West Australian engineering company.

Despite her career in engineering and her journey into motherhood, Loretta continued to write. Not because she had a lot of time but because it was an addiction she couldn't ignore.