Lynne Bowen is a mother of three who lives with her husband in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. After a short career as a public health nurse, she began the study of history, receiving her Master of Arts degree in Western Canadian History from the University of Victoria in 1980. Since then, she has pieced together a career doing historical research, a radio column, oral history, teaching adult education courses, writing videos, conducting coal mining tours, preparing sign texts for heritage interpretive routes, writing magazine articles and books, and teaching creative writing.

She is the author of two volumes of popular history about the coal miners of Vancouver Island. Boss Whistle was published in 1982 and won the Eaton's British Columbia Book Award and the Canadian Historical Association's Regional Certificate of Merit for British Columbia. Three Dollar Dreams was published in 1987 and won the Lieutenant - Governors Medal for Writing British Columbia History and was short-listed for the Roderick Hague-Brown Prize.

Her third book, Muddling Through: The Remarkable Story of the Barr Colonists, was published in 1992 and won the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction prize and the Canadian Historical Association Regional Certificate of Merit for the Prairie Provinces and the Yukon. Her most recent book, Those Lake People, Stories of Cowichan Lake, was published in 1995.

Lynne is the granddaughter of Barr Colonists Ivan and Bessie Crossley. Her father, Desmond Crossley, was born and educated in Lloydminster. Her mother was Muriel Holtby. The city and surrounding countryside still are home to many of her relatives.

Lynne Bowen is the Maclean Hunter Lecturer in Creative Non-Fiction Writing at the University of British Columbia. Her current project is a history of the people of the oil patch. She hopes that she will be able to meet some of Lloydminster’s oil pioneers in the course of her research.