Beatrice Grimshaw

Born in County Antrim, Ireland, Beatrice Grimshaw became known as a novelist, journalist, and traveler whose life was as restless as her books. Before her Pacific years, she worked in journalism and edited the Social Review, and she also wrote for the Irish Cyclist.

In 1903, she began traveling as a correspondent for the Daily Graphic and The Times. That work took her to the Pacific, and she eventually settled in Papua, where she spent many years writing novels, short stories, and travel accounts drawn from the places and people around her.

Sources differ on whether she was born in 1870 or 1871, but they agree that she died in Australia in 1953. Today she is remembered for her energetic travel writing and for fiction that captures both the excitement and the colonial attitudes of her era.