Natasha Lester

Ten years in marketing came before any of the novels, including a spell as Maybelline's marketing manager at L'Oréal in Australia. Natasha Lester then studied creative writing, and her debut, What Is Left Over, After, took the T.A.G. Hungerford Award. The Paris Seamstress (2018) follows Estella Bissette, who leaves Paris in 1940 with a sewing machine and almost nothing else, makes her way in the garment trade of New York, and whose granddaughter Fabienne, a fashion curator in Australia, later unpicks what the family had kept quiet. The Paris Secret (2020) puts Skye Penrose into the Air Transport Auxiliary, ferrying aircraft to RAF bases, and draws in Catherine Dior, for whom her brother Christian named the scent Miss Dior; the modern thread begins with a wardrobe of Dior dresses that should not exist. Lester lives in Perth with her husband and three children, collects vintage clothing and draws fashion illustration.