Originally from Waitara, Taranaki, Fran Byrd now lives on the Kapiti Coast with her dog, Tiger. She paints, writes poetry and fiction and occasionally tends to an untidy garden. She won the New Plymouth Girls' High school poetry prize at age 15 but chose Anthropology over English to complete her degree at Victoria University. This was followed by a post - graduate diploma in health education at Wellington teachers' college. In her role as a health education officer she sometimes wrote and prepared pamphlets for publication. Later she worked for the Ministry of Transport's information section researching, writing, editing and preparing educational material for printing and publication. She was in the early stages of writing a book on the history of transport in New Zealand when she was accepted for nursing training at Wellington Polytechnic. 

During her varied and demanding nursing career, Fran worked as a foundation tutor for Whitireia Polytechnic where she used her skills and experience to produce lectures and develop courses in topics as diverse as cross-cultural health practises, sexuality, therepeutic massage and acute medical and surgical nursing. In the latter part of her career, she worked in community mental health, specialising in mental health issues concerning older people. One of her clients insisted she should write a book about her small farming experiences and so after retiring from nursing, Fran self-published a fictionalised account of her life on the farm and her work in community mental health called 'El Rancho Bizarro'. A children's book called 'A Donkey is Born' followed and she has also self-published a satryical booklet on astrological signs. Over the last two to three years she has been working on two full length books - 'The Cloud People', an older children's fantasy, and an anthology of poems called 'A Brief History of Fight and Flight' which covers a wide range of topics and includes some of Fran's artwork. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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