Karen Harrison was born in Dungannon, Northern Ireland, and grew up in Buckinghamshire, England. She graduated in PPE from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1989 and qualified as an accountant in 1994. She spent ten years in public practice, working in Indonesia, Russia and the UK. In 2002, she moved into industry. Retaining her international focus, she held a series of finance director positions with major media businesses in Ukraine, Bulgaria and the US. In January 2014, Karen was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent significant surgery. The forty-eight poems in this book cover a period of five years, from Italy in 2011 to Portland, Oregon, in 2016.
