Marilyn Duckworth, OBE, fiction writer and poet, was born in Auckland but has lived mainly in Wellington. Her first novel, A Gap in the Spectrum (1959), was published when she was twenty-three; her fifth, Disorderly Conduct (1984), won a New Zealand Book Award. She has been awarded the Scholarship in Letters three times, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship in 1980 and a Fulbright Scholarship in 1987. She has held fellowships at Victoria and Auckland universities. In 1996 Leather Wings was shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers Prize. In that year she edited a book on New Zealand writing sisters—Cherries on a Plate. Her thirteenth novel, Studmuffin, appeared in 1997.