Olga Meredith Lawler was born in Pambula, NSW, in 1919. She started her career as a journalist at the Cobargo Chronicle. In 1940 she married Charles Masters and over the following twenty years, they lived in New South Wales country towns and had a family of seven children. Olga Masters continued working as a journalist for the Northern Star in Lismore and later for the Manly Daily, the Land and the Sydney Morning Herald. She began her ficton-writing career in 1975. Her first collection, The Home Girls (1982), won a National Book Council Award. This was followed by Loving Daughters (1984), A Long Time Dying (1985), and Amy's Children (1987). Her last collection, The Rose Fancier and her playscript The Working Man's Castle were both published in 1988. A collection of her journalism, Reporting Home, was published posthumously in 1990. The University of Queensland Press published the Collected Stories of Olga Masters in 1996.