Waking up in a sumptuous seventeenth-century French château every day is a dreamlike opportunity for any historical author. Cheryl’s experience of living and working in the beautiful Château de Breteuil prompted her to write her first novel, LA CREOLE, which was also inspired by friendship with two women from the French Antilles. Her first six historical novels were published under her maiden name, Cheryl Sawyer.

Cheryl's second novel, REBEL, is the story of a young French noblewoman who eloped to the American War of Independence, to join Lafayette and a group of Frenchmen who fought with Washington’s Contintentals.

Cheryl Sawyer was born in New Zealand. Her first voyage to the northern hemisphere took her through the Caribbean, where she fell in love with coral islands. In 2005 she revisited in Martinique one of the friends who inspired her first novel, and in the Pacific she has been to Fiji, Hawaii, Tahiti, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Samoa and Rarotonga. When she first started writing SIREN in 1998, she made the heroine, Léonore Roncival, mistress of an uncharted Caribbean island. Léonore is also the granddaughter of Ayisha, the exotic heroine of LA CREOLE.

THE CHASE (2005) and THE CODE OF LOVE (2006) draw on Cheryl’s different sojourns in England and France, and THE WINTER PRINCE (2007) explores the England of the Civil War, from 1642 to 1644.
With a career in teaching and publishing, Cheryl has two master’s degrees with honours, in both French and English literature, and has tutored in French language and literature at the University of Auckland. Her training as a publisher began with educational books in Auckland. She subsequently worked as a freelancer on a wide range of non-fiction and fiction, the highlight being her editing of THE BONE PEOPLE by Keri Hulme, which won the 1985 Booker Prize in the United Kingdom. When Cheryl’s family moved to Sydney, Australia, she became publisher for an independent Australian company. At present she publishes popular fiction and non-fiction collections for an international company.