Cheryl Adam spent her childhood in rural Australia where her love of storytelling began. In adulthood, she travelled widely and lived overseas including in Africa and Europe. She has been evicted, kidnapped, abandoned, made homeless and discriminated against in her foreign adventures and this helped develop her deep empathy for the plight of immigrant women. Her concern for marginalised women and the environment took her to the Philippines where she taught homeless women how to create useable art from plastic bags developing a cottage industry. This experience inspired her to begin a creative writing course at Holmesglen TAFE in Melbourne. Her debut novel Lillian’s Eden (Spinifex Press, 2018) is the prequel to Out of Eden.

"Out of Eden is an engaging story of a resilient mother and daughter who defy the conventions of their era. Cheryl Adam is a natural storyteller with a comic gift who succeeds in capturing the feel of the 1960s and its uneasy transition between the stifling conformity of postwar Australia and the move into the new freedoms of the 1970s. It also features that rare thing, a lively and unsentimental portrait of a truly good woman." — Amanda Lohrey