Lilian Turner

Born in Lincoln, England, in 1867, Lilian Wattnall Burwell Turner was the daughter of commercial traveler Bennett George Burwell, and his wife, Sarah Jane Shaw. Her younger sister, Ethel Turner (born 1870), would also go on to become an author. After her father’s death in 1871, her mother married factory manager Henry Turner, whose surname she and Ethel took as their own. Henry Turner died in 1878, and the family emigrated to Australia, where Lilian and Ethel Turner were educated at the Sydney Girls’ High School. Here they ran their own magazines, the Iris and the Parthenon, in opposition to The Gazette, run by another noted Australian children's author, Louise Mack.Turner's first novel, The Lights of Sydney, won Cassell’s Novel Competition in 1894, and she went on to pen over twenty more, many of them for young girls. She married dentist Frederick Lindsay Thompson in 1898, and they had two sons. Turner died in 1956.