Tracey Herd was born in 1968 in East Kilbride but has lived on the east coast of Scotland for most of her life. She is a freelance writer who worked for some years as a bookseller, was Creative Writing Fellow at Dundee University in 1998-2001, and has latterly been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. She has published two collections with Bloodaxe, No Hiding Place (1996) and Dead Redhead (2001), with a third, Not in This World, due out in autumn 2015.