Karen Phillips began writing in 2009 winning the Katherine Mansfield Novice award and the Heartland competitions that year and has continued to be successful in other competitions since then. Her stories have been published in Takahe and Flash Frontier and included in the Fresh Ink anthology. Her short story collection A Question of Blood was published by Steele Roberts in 2017. She lives on a hill overlooking the sea with her husband, twenty olive trees and sometimes a big black Labrador dog.