Yes, Jesse Blackadder really was born with that surname. An award winning Australian novelist, short story writer and freelance journalist, she is fascinated by landscapes, adventurous women and really cold places.Her latest novel, Chasing the Light, is historical fiction based on the true but forgotten story of the first women to reach Antarctica. It is published in Australia by Fourth Estate (February 2013). Jesse won the 2011/12 Australian Antarctic Arts Fellowship and travelled to Antarctica to research the novel. Her essay about her research, 'The first woman and the last dog in Antarctica', won the 2012 Guy Morrison Award for Literary Journalism.Jesse's second novel, The Raven's Heart, came about when she'd finally had enough of people asking if she was related to Rowan Atkinson. She travelled to Scotland to find the origins of the Blackadder surname and discovered the ruins of Blackadder House on the banks of the Blackadder River. The Raven's Heart won the Varuna HarperCollins Manuscript Development Award in Australia and was published there in 2011 by Fourth Estate, and internationally in 2012 by Bywater Books in 2012.Her first novel, After the Party (Hardie Grant Books 2005), made the Australian Book Review list of all time favourite Australian novels in 2010.Jesse has been a writer in residence in Sitka Alaska, in the Australian outback and at Byron Bay, and has been a fellow three times at Varuna The Writers' House, Australia's leading residential program for writers. She is completing her Doctor of Creative Arts at the University of Western Sydney. Born in Sydney, she now lives near Byron Bay on Australia's east coast. For more about Jesse please see her website at www.jesseblackadder.com