'Cherry Wilder' was the daughter of Marmari and Alan Lockett, teachers in primary schools in remote areas of the North Island, New Zealand. Wilder began to write at the age of six and in 1941 won second prize for a Christmas story competition in the Auckland Herald Children's Pages. Her father died in the same year during the Battle of Crete. She attended Nelson Girls College and Canterbury University College, Christchurch, graduating with a B.A. in 1952. Her major subject was English and she wrote poetry and short stories while in high school and at university. Wilder also produced and acted in plays.
In 1952 Wilder married A. J. Anderson and they moved to Newcastle, New South Wales, in 1954. Wilder produced plays for a local theatre company while writing short stories for women's and men's magazines. In 1962 Wilder moved to Sydney. She married Horst Grimm, already known to science fiction fans, in 1963. She wrote reviews for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian as well as short stories published in Australian Letters, Southerly, Westerly and Meanjin. The family relocated to West Germany in 1976 where Wilder lived until returning to New Zealand in 1997. Her husband had died in 1992.
Wilder started writing science fiction in 1974 after a positive response to her story, 'The Ark of James Carlyle'. It was reprinted about seven times and appeared in The Reader's Digest's Great Short Stories of Australasia. She wrote: 'I was definitely inspired to write SF in Australia and will always be, in some way, an Australian SF writer.' Wilder published over fifty short stories and novels using the 'Wilder' pseudonym, which was derived from Laura Ingalls Wilder, Thornton Wilder and Sir John Wilder in the television show The Power Game.
(Source: The MUP Encyclopaedia of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy ed. Paul Collins (1998): 181-182).
