Bonnie Etherington is from New Zealand, but spent most of her childhood in West Papua and Darwin, Australia. She currently lives with her husband and cat in Evanston, IL, where she is a PhD student in Northwestern University's English department, studying ecology and trans-Indigeneity in Oceanic literatures. Her first novel, The Earth Cries Out, draws on her experiences in West Papua and was published in March 2017 by Penguin Random House NZ.