Hilary Taylor is a graduate of Edinburgh University and lives in Suffolk, where she taught for almost twenty years. She has five grown-up children and, at the last count, eight grandchildren. Her short fiction has been published in magazines and anthologies and she was the winner of the Bridport Prize for Flash Fiction in 2022. Sea Defences, her first novel, began life as a prize-winning short story, placed third in the Bath Short Story Award.