Martha Ostenso was born near Bergen, Norway in 1900, and died at Seattle, Washington in 1963. Ostenso's family immigrated to the midwestern US in 1902, then to Brandon, Manitoba, and later to Winnipeg, where Ostenso completed high school. Before attending University of Manitoba, she taught briefly in Hayland, Manitoba. Ostenso worked briefly as a reporter, then moved to the US in 1921. She studied with Canadian Douglas Durkin at Columbia University in New York, and did social work in Brooklyn for several years before moving with Durkin to Gull Lake, Minn, in 1931. She is the author of one book of poetry and sixteen novels, of which Wild Geese is the best known.