Bryn Hammond (she/her, and queer) lives in a coastal town in Australia, where she likes to write while walking in the sea. She grew up on ancient and medieval epics, the Arthur cycle original and modern, nineteenth-century novelists, particularly Russian and French, and out of fashion poets, namely Algernon Swinburne. Always a writer – to the neglect of other paths in life that might have been more sensible -- she found the perfect story in The Secret History of the Mongols, a thirteenth-century prose and verse account of Chinggis Khan.