The routine for Miriam Frank as a child was to flee without family, except her mother, from the moment she was born in the year the Spanish Civil War broke out. Her mother was German and her father American, both of Jewish descent. She fled to France, only to flee again from the Nazis and from there to Casablanca., Mexico and finally New Zealand, where her mother's sister lived and she was schooled and attended university.

Frank paints a vivid and poignant portrait of a life as refugee through the colourful images of a child's eye from Collioure and Oran to markets in Mexico's Xochilmilco and New Zealand in the fifties.

Miriam Frank trained as a doctor at Otago University and later became an anaesthesist at the Royal London Hospital. She is currently is a translator of Spanish literature and lives in London, visiting New Zealand with regularity.