Kate Wilhelm was born Katie Gertrude Meredith, the daughter of Jesse Thomas and Ann McDowell Meredith, in Toledo, Ohio. After graduating from high school in Louisville, Kentucky, she worked as a model, a telephone operator, a sales clerk, a switchboard operator and then an underwriter for an insurance company. She married Joseph Wilhelm in 1947 and had two sons before she began to write fiction in 1956. Her first story, "The Pint-Sized Genie," appeared in Fantastic in October of that year. In 1962 she published her first novel, a mystery entitled More Bitter Than Death. She won the Nebula Award for her short story "The Planners" (1968; collected in The Downstairs Room, 1968) and won both the Hugo and Jupiter awards for her novel Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976). Wilhelm was the second woman ever to win the Hugo Award for "best novel." She has written twelve novels, a book of two...