Internationally recognised children's author Beverley Randell was educated in Wellington and gained a BA in English and History from Victoria University College. She worked as a primary school teacher in New Zealand. Her experiences teaching children to read helping her devise what Dennis McEldowney, quoted in the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature ed. Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (1998): 459, called 'minimal vocabularies to tell actual stories'.Her books had sold close to forty million copies by 1998. Her publications are listed in Beverley Randell : a checklist of children's books by her, 1955-1995 (1996).