With The Hunger Games topping cinema box-office charts, Gerry Northam profiles Suzanne Collins, the children's author who wrote the best-selling books on which the film is based. Her trilogy, set in a post-apocalypse America, is said to have been inspired by a combination of Greek myth and reality television as well as Collins' own upbringing as the daughter of an air-force officer who served in Vietnam. So how much do we know about the woman behind the phenomenon now being described as the US equivalent of Harry Potter?