Wendy Guest was born in the coal and steel town of Wollongong, NSW in 1958. She began her career as a journalist, worked in the media office of NSW Premier Barrie Unsworth, as a communication consultant to the ALP and in the Prime Minister’s Office as speech writer and media assistant to Annita Keating in the 1990s. She moved to Chicago and a career in corporate education in 2000, returning to Sydney in 2013, where she is a freelance writer in Sydney.