Melissa Ashley is a writer, poet, birder and academic who facilitates courses in creative writing and poetry at universities and has published a collection of poems, HOSPITAL FOR DOLLS. What started out as research for a PhD dissertation on Elizabeth Gould became a labour of love and her first novel, THE BIRDMAN’S WIFE which won the Queensland Literary Awards fiction prize and the Australian Booksellers’ Choice Award. Inspired by her heroine, she studied taxidermy as a volunteer at the Queensland Museum. Melissa’s follow up book is THE BEE AND THE ORANGE TREE and then THE NATURALIST OF AMSTERDAM.