Ngaio Marsh was born in New Zealand in 1920. At the age of four, she was left incapacitated by polio. She spent the next eleven years under the supervision of her mother, who was determined that Ngaio should not live with her father because he drank too much. Although her early childhood was lonely and deprived, she later credited this period with giving her an enthusiasm for life and an appreciation of individuality
Read more
Her first published work, The Man Who Lived Underground, appeared when she was eighteen years old, and it featured a winning romantic element which was to remain a constant throughout her life. In 1941 she joined the New Zealand Women's Land Army and served in a number of places including Wanganui, Wellington and Napier. In 1946, while on leave from the Land Army, she began to write full-time for a Wellington newspaper.
Three years later, while living in Christchurch, she published the first of two detective stories, In a Lonely Place. In 1953 she moved to London and worked as a free-lance journalist until 1954 when she married Gordon Daviot and took up writing full-time once again. She has been writing novels ever since.