Casey Lea began as a family...

The Casey Lea partnership began back in the carefree ‘90s with the birth of Emma Casey, to Shelley Lea (pronounced Lee). A shared imagination and love of the fantastic eventually led to the creation of a growing number of books.

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The start of the story...

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Shelley Frost was always a daddy’s girl. In the very best sense of that phrase. She was William Adam’s firstborn, and it was irrelevant that she was a girl because they clicked. She was blessed with a great family unit, but all the best memories of her childhood involve her father. He was a tall man with great presence but a ready wit that stopped him from being intimidating. He was utterly fair and never lost his temper with his children, even when he had to discipline them. He was a teacher, a soldier, and a poet. His love of literature was among the most important things he shared with his daughter.

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Bill died of cancer when he was forty-seven.

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His family was devastated. He left a space that was impossible to fill and took decades to come to terms with. However, this loss ultimately changed Shelley’s path in life.

When she completed her science degree at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, something seemed to be missing.

Her qualification was very practical for finding work, but the lack of an arts degree nagged at her. It felt as if she might be letting her father down, or at least that she'd missed something vital to her satisfaction in life.

She returned to university to complete a degree in English Literature. The joy of that degree stuck with Shelley, even after she found a job that combined her love of science and writing, by working with third-year research students at the New Zealand College of Early Childhood Education.

Shelley added a Certificate of Publishing to her qualifications and gained the chance to work as a manuscript assessor at Hazard Press in Christchurch, New Zealand.

This rewarding job encouraged the always flickering desire to try writing herself. She combined that with a long-term love of fantasy to let her imagination finally spill onto the page. It remained there, handwritten and dog-eared, until her first daughter was old enough to fan it to life – starting by insisting it was copied into a computer.

That book became IceFlight and the mother-daughter partnership was underway.

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The story continues...

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They published their first book together in 2012 and have been writing ever since. Emma’s qualification in creative design and her experience with computers (which included streaming World of Warcraft) brought essential new skills and lore to the mother-daughter team.

The learning curve has been steep but feedback from enthusiastic readers is the best incentive imaginable. Emma and Shelley trust their journey through the wonderful world of fantasy will continue and be enjoyed by many other fans of this rich genre.