Lolo Houbein, of Aldgate in the Adelaide Hills, came to Australia from The Netherlands with her husband and children in 1958 at the age of 24. She did not speak English, yet eleven years later she matriculated as an adult student and Lolo is now an accomplished and prolific writer in English, with an extensive portfolio and an impressive list of awards and commendations.

For her novel 'Walk a Barefoot Road', in which she depicted the alienation and solitude of migrants, Lolo received the ABC/Bicentennial Fiction Award (the Kylie Tennant Award). It was also short listed for the Courier-Mail’s Brisbane Bicentennial Literary Competition and the novel was dramatised in 18 episodes on ABC National Radio during August and September in 1989.

After the release of its second edition in 1990, a 'Walk a Barefoot Road' exhibition of 30 hand-woven tapestries by artists from three states toured South Australia and Tasmania for most of 1991. In the same year, this novel was copied into Braille and onto cassettes for blind and handicapped readers by the Royal Blind Society of Sydney.

Of the many involvements and achievements probably one of the most important ones was establishing Men of the Trees (South Australia), now know as Trees for Life, with Burr Dodd in 1981.

She identifies with migrants and multicultural writers and compiled the first survey of multicultural writers in Australia in 1976. Her ten years of bibliographical research was incorporated in a Bibliography of Australian Multicultural Writers, published by Deakin University (1992).

Her work received official recognition in 2002 when she was awarded the Australian Medal for Services to Literature and the Environment.