Juanita Casey (1925–2012), bestselling novelist, celebrated poet, horse trainer, and artist, was born to an Irish Traveller mother and an English Romany father and raised by English adoptive parents with ties to the circus industry. Casey identified with the many heritages she considered her own: she resided with Romanies in England for a time, worked as a circus horsemaster, and lived a bohemian life in Ireland with her Irish husband in the 1960s and 1970s, during which time she wrote her masterpiece, The Horse of Selene (published in 1971).