Portia Da Costa is a British author who has lived and worked in West Yorkshire, in the north of England, all her life. She began her writing career almost by mistake, when she was asked to write a story for an artist friend to illustrate. A librarian at the time, and a voracious reader since childhood, Portia had never considered becoming an author, but not one to shun a challenge, she took up her pen and wrote her first-ever piece of fiction, a melodramatic tale of the doomed romance between a mortal woman and an unusually handsome and nondecrepit zombie. The story was rubbish, of course, but Portia enjoyed the creative process so much that she resolved to learn how to write properly.
After a number of years writing purely for pleasure, Portia's first published story appeared in 1991, and was about a sexy ghost this time. Since then, she's gone on to write well over a hundred stories for magazines and anthologies, and she's also produced almost thirty novels across a variety of genres. Although she's written gentler tales in her time, she's known best of all for her sizzling-hot erotic romances, and her steamy contemporary Suite Seventeen, won the 2007 Romance B(u)y the Book Best Contemporary Erotic Romance Award.
Chance of a Lifetime, a November 2008 SPICE Brief, was Portia's first-ever work for Harlequin Books and represents the fulfillment of a long-cherished dream. Her very first attempts at writing for publication were category-length semisweet romances targeted at Mills & Boon. None of these early efforts was successful, but Portia's deep yearning to write for the world's best-known romance publisher has never waned.
Portia is a now full-time author and lives in a small, typically Yorkshire town with her husband of many, many years, and also the three beautiful cats they both adore. When she's not writing, she likes to read, just generally chill out and watch television. A lot of television. She also loves to spend time online with cyber friends at her favorite writers' message boards and on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Among her other interests are art, fashion and popular science, and she also shares her husband's passion for the military history of World War Two.
