New Zealand novelist and poet Ruth France was born in Leithfield, North Canterbury, New Zealand in 1913. She published two novels: The Race (1958), which won the New Zealand Literary Fund’s Award for Achievement, and Ice Cold River (1961); and two volumes of poetry: Unwilling Pilgrim (1955) and The Halting Place (1961), under the pseudonym Paul Henderson. She had completed a third manuscript of poetry and was working on a third novel when she died in 1968.