Baba Schwartz was born in Hungary in December 1927. A Holocaust survivor, she migrated with her family to Australia in the 1950s. Her cookbook, The Lost Art of Baking with Yeast: Delicious Hungarian Cakes and Pastries, was published in 2003. Her memoir, The May Beetles: My First Twenty Years, was published in 2016. She died in June 2017 at the age of 89.