Margaret Mahy was born in 1934 in Whakatane, in the North East of New Zealand's North Island. From an early age, she demonstrated a precocious facility with language and storytelling, and a prodigious imagination. She studied at the then University of New Zealand, gaining a BA, then trained as a librarian at Wellington's Library School in 1956. In 1965, she moved to Christchurch, where she took work as a librarian, first driving a Book Bus for the New Zealand School Library Service, taking books to schools around the remote small towns of the Canterbury Plains. In 1976, she became Children's Librarian at the Christchurch Public Library. All the while, she was writing.