Elizabeth Bowen was born in 1899 in Dublin and raised in England. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled Encounter, was published in 1923. Thereafter she produced plays, reviews, eleven novels, nine collections of short stories, and eleven volumes of nonfiction, and she worked as a reporter for the British Ministry of Information during the Second World War; by night she was an air raid warden. Awards for her work included the CBE (Companion of the British Empire). Bowen and her husband, Alan Cameron, had no children. Bowen died in 1973 and is buried with her husband close to the gates of the Bowen family land, Bowen’s Court, in County Cork, Ireland.