Elizabeth Stromme (1947–2006)

Elizabeth Stromme was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and grew up in the affluent suburb of Edina. She attended Northwestern University and the University of California, Berkeley and traveled abroad extensively in the early 1970s.
She met her husband Philippe Garnier, a writer, in France.
For eight years, she worked in advertising until she could afford to quit in order to write full time.

In 1976, Stromme and Garnier moved to an Arts & Crafts bungalow overlooking Sunset Boulevard in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, a place she once said was fraught with narrative tension.
Her noir novel Joe’s Word was set in Echo Park. It was published in French seven years before it debuted in English in 2003 (City Lights Books) and won praise for its wry wit and amused affection for the neighborhood.
Her first novel, Against the Grain, a thriller about the high-stakes agribusiness, had been published in 1994 by the French publishing house Gallimard, which later issued Joe's Word.
Her novel Plunder in the Grass: A Botanical Garden at Work was optioned in 2006 by filmmakers. Although she was fluent in French, Stromme wrote her novels in English.

Her husband oversaw the translations.

Stromme also wrote the "Underground Gardener" column for the L.A. Alternative Press and articles on gardening for various other newspapers, including Le Monde and The LA Times, and horticultural publications. She died at age 59 from stomach cancer.