Leading Ladies

Natasha Lester

Natasha is the international bestselling author of A Kiss from Mr Fitzgerald, Her Mother's Secret, The Paris Seamstress, The French Photographer, The Paris Secret, The Riviera House and The Three Lives of Alix St Pierre, and a former marketing executive for L'Oreal. Her novels have been translated into 21 languages and are published all around the world.

When she's not writing, she loves collecting vintage fashion, practising the art of fashion illustration and reading about history. Natasha is a sought-after public speaker and lives with her husband and three children in Perth, Western Australia.

Rachael Johns

Rachael is an English teacher by trade, a mum 24/7, a Diet Coke addict, a cat lover and chronic arachnophobe. She rarely sleeps and never irons. She is also the bestselling, ABIA-winning author of The Patterson Girls and a number of other romance and women’s fiction books, including her recent bestseller, Something to Talk About. Rachael is currently Australia’s leading writer of contemporary relationship stories around women’s issues, a genre she has coined ‘life-lit’.

Rachael has finaled in a number of competitions, including the Australian Romance Readers Awards. Jilted (her first rural romance) won Favourite Australian Contemporary Romance in 2012, and The Patterson Girls won the 2016 Romance Writers of Australia RUBY Award and also the 2015 Australian Book Industry Award for General Fiction. She continually places in Booktopia’s Top 50 Aussie Authors poll.

Rachael lives in the Swan Valley with her hyperactive husband, three mostly-gorgeous heroes-in-training, two ravenous cats, a cantankerous bird and a very badly-behaved dog.

Sasha Wasley

Sasha was born and raised in Boorloo / Perth. She holds a PhD in feminist literature and loves nature, Jane Austen and puns.

Sasha loves the Australian environment and has a fascination with animals, trees and our extraordinary wild landscape. She likes nothing better than exploring the countryside, going on adventures and discovering new sights. She regularly attends regional and city-based literary events and is always delighted to be invited to festivals.

Sasha is an advocate for literacy and creativity and runs writing workshops for children and adults whenever she can. She is a WA Ambassador for Books in Homes Australia charity promoting early book ownership for life success.

Her debut novel was published in 2015 and by the end of 2023 she will have 16 published novels in the world. Today, she lives in the Perth hills region with her partner and two daughters, surrounded by dogs, cats and chickens.

Sasha can’t seem to constrain herself to one genre. She writes middle grade fiction as Ash Harrier and paranormal young adult novels as S.D. Wasley.