Carolyn Taylor-Watts was born and grew up in New Zealand but has lived the majority of her life in Toronto. She quit work as a registered nurse to write fiction, but her first three books are true stories of search, rescue, tragedy and survival across Canada's vast and inhospitable landscape, written under the name Carolyn Matthews and published by Nimbus in Halifax, and Dundurn Press in Toronto. Her stories inspired the Television series, The Guard, and Call Out. Helena: An Odyssey is her first novel, an epic saga of historical fiction set in early 20th century Turkey, Greece and Toronto, her heroine a hair dresser. Asked about the mantra imposed on aspiring writers to write about what you know, she answered that this is a disservice to the imagination, the greatest tool a writer has. Learn something else, Tom Wolfe advised. To learn about other cultures, about other centuries, is to enrich and expand one's life immeasurably, and she set out to research early 20th century Greco-Turkish wars, the burning of Smyrna, and forced exchange of populations - a history not particularly well-known. Neither is the power and symbolism of hair over all the centuries, she added, a fabulous and disturbing history that resonates today. Not least, a hair dresser as protagonist is unusual, and probably unique.
