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Lydia Bradey is one of Australasia's foremost high-altitude mountaineers. Beginning her alpine career in the 1970s, she made her first ascent of Aoraki/Mount Cook while still a teenager. Following her dream to become a climber, she travelled to Alaska, Nepal, Bhutan and Pakistan, where, in 1987, she became the first Australasian woman to climb an 8000-metre peak, Gasherbrum 2. In 1988, she made a historic ascent of Mount Everest, becoming the first woman to reach the summit without supplementary oxygen. Employed as a professional mountain guide, she has made two further ascents of Everest as well as climbed and guided extensively throughout Nepal, Pakistan, Antarctica, South America, Africa and Europe. She lives at Lake Hawea, Otago, with her partner - and fellow mountain guide - Dean Staples. Laurence Fearnley is an award-winning novelist and non-fiction writer. Her novel The Hut Builder won the fiction category of the 2011 New Zealand Post Book Awards and was shortlisted for the international 2010 Boardman Tasker Prize for mountain writing. Edwin and Matilda was runner-up in the 2008 Montana New Zealand Book Awards and her second novel, Room, was shortlisted for the same award in 2001. Fearnley has also been awarded the Artists to Antarctica Fellowship (2004) and the Robert Burns Fellowship (2007). In 2013, Fearnley published a work of non-fiction, 45 South: A Journey across Southern New Zealand, with photographer Arno Gasteiger, and in 2012 researched New Zealand mountaineering, writing for a PhD in Creative Writing from Victoria University of Wellington. Laurence lives in Dunedin with her husband, son and a couple of dogs. She has been friends with Lydia since the 1980s, when they shared a house in Christchurch.
