Greta Rana MBE (awarded Order of the British Empire in 2005) is an author and poet born in Yorkshire, UK. She has been living in Nepal for over forty years. She first ventured into literary fiction in the 1970s after two short genre novels, ‘Nothing Greener’ and ‘Distant hills’ and a popular cliff-hanger written for a weekly newspaper titled ‘Against the Winds of Tomorrow.’ Her work in mountain areas was to provide the themes for her novels as she observed a country left behind and finding transition difficult against the ethnic and cultural divides and the suffering caused by the desperation of poverty in one of the harshest terrains on earth: her insights have also been sharpened by periods living in Laos and Afghanistan and work in and visits to Pakistan’s Northern Areas.