Bill Fairbairn is the editor emeritus of the independent community newspaper Riverview Park Review in Ottawa, Canada. His journalism career since 1950 took in full-time stints in Britain, France, Africa and Canada. His first job, after leaving high school at age 15, was on the Jedburgh Gazette, in the Scottish Borders. Then came the Blyth News, the Derby Evening Telegraph, the Sheffield Telegraph, the London Sun, the Scotsman, the Vancouver Province, the Williams Lake Tribune, the Montreal Star, Radio Canada International (CBC), the Montreal Gazette, the Ottawa Citizen (part time) and Legion Magazine. He taught journalism full time on the aboriginal reserve near Kamloops, British Columbia, and evening class journalism in Ottawa. Bill spent five years in the 1960s in Africa, working consecutively as a journalist for The Rhodesia Herald, now located in Harare, Zimbabwe, the Northern News in Ndola, now Zambia, and the Daily Nation in Nairobi. This book is his fifth.

Bill's full name is William Douglas Fairbairn. He had two grandfathers who served Lairds of the Manor in the Scottish Borderland. On his father's side, Grandpa David Fairbairn was the laird's butler; and on his mother's side, Grandpa Peter Darling worked as one of the laird's farmhands. He had an uncle, James Douglas, a well-decorated World War I soldier, who, at Sir Walter Scott's Abbotsford home, served descendants of the famed novelist and where, during school holidays and when his mother was ill, Bill was nurtured in Scottish literature.