Jenni Ogden grew up in a country town in the South Island of New Zealand, in a home bursting with books and music. Armed with NZ and Australian university degrees in zoology and psychology, she took up a postdoctoral fellowship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked with H.M., the most famous amnesiac in history, before returning to Auckland University, where she taught clinical psychology students and practiced neuropsychology at Auckland Hospital. She wrote about her patients’ moving stories in two books, Fractured Minds: A Case-Study Approach to Clinical Neuropsychology and Trouble In Mind: Stories from a Neuropsychologist’s Casebook. Now she has given up her day job to write fiction. She moved with her husband to live off-grid on a spectacular island off the coast of NZ, with winters spent traveling (she is a master at finding cheap travel options) and at their second home in tropical Far North Queensland. She has had a love affair with remote islands since her twenties, from the Shetlands to the north of Scotland to the tropical islands of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (both feature in A Drop in the Ocean). Once upon a time, like Anna, Jenni spent summers on a coral cay rather like Turtle Island, tagging sea turtles. (There was no Tom the turtle whisperer though!) When she is not writing or traveling, Jenni can be found on the beach—always with a book—or spending time with her family. A Drop in the Ocean is her first novel.
