It was during the late 1990s - while Peg Kingman was a tea merchant and a beginning bagpiper -that she first stumbled across the marvelous but all-too-obscure history which sparked her novel Not Yet Drown’d. As founder of a tea company (now defunct), she was delighted to obtain a few genuine tea plants grown from wild Chinese seed stock, and arranged for a local grower to propagate the plants. Soon she was shipping young tea plants to tea enthusiasts throughout the United States. She planted a small garden of them herself - fifty plants or so - and learned by experiment how to grow, pluck, and manufacture tea by hand. As she studied tea history, she was interested to note how tardy the British were in recognizing that tea - Camellia sinensis - was not confined to China, but in fact grew wild in the hills of Assam.

She was also learning to play bagpipe about this time, and in an old book of traditional Scottish tunes, she read about a manuscript of classical bagpipe music - piobaireachd - which has been lost in India since the 1750s. She was captivated by the notion that such a manuscript might have survived, somewhere in India.

“I thought about all this for some time, profoundly fascinated, but feeling utterly unqualified to do justice to this unwieldy and disparate material - which somehow seemed to want to coalesce into a single story,” she has said. “More than a year passed while I wished that some accomplished writer - one of the writers I admire - would make something of it, so that I could have the ease and pleasure of simply reading a finished novel. Finally I realized that no one else was going to write this novel - they all had their own novels to write. Besides, who else had collected all this odd, obscure knowledge? All this seemingly unconnected stuff about tea - bagpipe music - dangerous horses - engineering - and all the rest? It became apparent that if I did not undertake to write this book, it would not get written at all. And it seemed to me that it was my job to do the best I could with this knotty tangle of material that somehow had fallen - over a period of years - into my lap.”

A fourth-generation Californian, Peg Kingman has lived and traveled in the United States, Scotland, France, India and New Zealand. She worked for many years as a technical writer in the high-tech, medical, environmental and marketing fields, and now lives with her husband and teenaged sons on a mountaintop in northern California. She has given up trying to train horses to harness, but continues to play bagpipe, grow tea, and write.