The bestselling The Girl in Steel-Capped Boots was Loretta Hill's commercial women's fiction debut. Loretta drew upon her own outback engineering experiences to write Lena Todd's journey of self-discovery into a world full of larrikins, red dust and steel-capped boots. Its sequel, The Girl in the Hard Hat, will publish in January 2013.

Loretta always wanted to be a writer. As a kid she filled pages of exercise books with stories to amuse her friends. Her father, who never wasted his time on fiction, didn't see much worth in this pass time and pushed her to pursue a 'sensible' career. Fortunately, she had inherited some of his talent for numbers and decided to give it a go. She graduated from the University of Western Australia as structural engineer and took her first job with a major West Australian engineering company.

A few years later she met a lawyer at a Black Friday party hosted by a friend. She was dressed as the devil and he just came as himself. They are now happily married and living in Perth with their two young sons and infant daughter.

Despite her career in engineering, her interest in law and her journey into motherhood, Loretta continued to write. Not because she had a lot of time but because it was and always had been an addiction she couldn't ignore. Less