Bethia Krage will tell anyone willing to listen that she's led the most dull, boring, uneventful life in the world. In her mind, maybe the most interesting thing about her is her heritage - she has Chinese, Maori, Irish, English, and French blood, the latter three through her father and the first two through her mother, who was originally from New Zealand. That was where her parents met, and in their first year of marriage, they made the move to Adelaide, Australia, which is where Bethia was born and where she's lived ever since.

Bethia was always an avid, intent reader, and rather than spending her childhood in front of a television, spent it reading books in her bedroom. She was a cheerful, upbeat child, but was a loner by nature; she would always rather spend her time reading than playing with friends, and for a while, it worried her parents. They did their best to encourage her to spend more time outside or with the kids she met at school, but although Bethia was social enough in the classroom and at lunchtime, when she had a choice, she was back in her bedroom with her nose stuck in a book. After a little while, her parents just gave up. Bethia was happy the way she was, and it wasn't up to them to change her.

Bethia's interest in art also became apparent at an early age, and this was one thing that her parents encouraged in her eagerly. Neither of them were artists, but they loved art and were ready and willing to be dragged through art store after art store in search of the perfect sketchbook or pack of markers. Interested always in fantasy, Bethia's drawings of imaginary creatures and fantasy warriors were hung up all over the house. She drew scenes from Tolkien and T.H. White and, after a little while, begin to make up narratives of her own. Combining her art and her writing, Bethia began to produce short illustrated stories when she was about ten, and never stopped drawing or writing. To this day, she draws her own birthday and Christmas cards.

This is usually the part where Bethia stops telling her life stoy. A few further events of note happened before the publishing of her first book, Foundling: her mother passed away in an accident when she was twelve years old, leaving Bethia to her father and his religious family; Bethia initially went to college hoping to go into journalism, but found the style of writing to be too sparse and flat for her, and she transferred to an art school; over the course of ten further years, she filled notebook upon notebook with drawings and writings based around an original world she'd created called the Half-Continent.

In 2004, Bethia had been working mostly in design and illustration when her notebooks were discovered by a friend in the publishing industry. They encouraged her to return to that fantasy world again, and she spent the next two years working on what was to become the first book of the Monster Blood Tattoo series, Foundling. The book won Best Young Adult Novel at the 2006 Aurealis Awards, and was placed on the 2007 list of best books for young adults by the American Library Association. Bethia has since written the final two books of the trilogy, Lamplighter and Factotum.