Josette Di Donna moved to Algiers with her parents after World War II. In 1962, after eight years of conflict between the colonial French forces and the Algerian National Liberation Front, France accorded Algeria its independence. Josette was married in Algiers, 'this city of rubble', and moved back to France at the age of nineteen with her husband, Daniel. Having cared for children in a North African hospital, she then worked in a psychiatric hospital in France, and completed some secondary studies. She was 'enthralled by the old French classics, their pathos, their panache.' She migrated to Australia with her husband and children. Her husband found a job with the railways, and subsequently they moved and later were transferred from bush sidings to bush towns all over South Australia, from the Nullarbor to Tailem Bend. They moved to Port Lincoln in 1993, and it was there that she discovered computers, at her local library. Learning to type was very boring, so instead she typed stories. Although she spoke French in her youth, today she writes only in English, the language of her maturity. She says that 'despite swallowing tanks of tea with other housewives', it is easier for her to communicate through writing than through speaking, as in this way she doesn't have to worry about her accent. In 1998 she was enrolled at Deakin University studying Psychology by correspondence. She has had five children, four of whom are living.
