Authors

Catherine Greer is an author of fiction and non-fiction, and an age positive advocate. She first collaborated with musician Alexander Lau on Jacaranda Snow (2018), her growth mindset picture book. Joanna Bartel is a designer and illustrator with experience in Arts education, design, teaching and creative marketing. She particularly loves character design and creating imaginative and playful images to engage children and enhance imaginative learning. Alexander Lau is a violinist and contemporary classical composer.Alex is also the composer of ‘Jacaranda Snow’, a piano quartet for the growth mindset picture book

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Chef Mark Gregory, honoured as Master of Culinary Arts by The Royal Academy, is known for his appearances on TV shows such as 'Ready Steady Cook' and the BBC 'Good Food Show'. He has cooked for a wide range of distinguished individuals, including royalty, presidents, prime ministers, movie stars, pop legends, and sporting greats. Mark's achievements are impressive, including being named New Zealand Chef of the Year in the late 1980s. He then went to London and won the British Chef of the Year award. In 1996, he was awarded the Meilleur Ouvrier for cooking, a master craftsman status in France, becoming the first New Zealander to do so.One of his most significant achievements is founding the DINEAID charity, which helps the New Zealand hospitality community raise funds for City Mission food banks during the Christmas season each year. Despite his extensive culinary experience, what truly brings the Gregory family together is Christmas. Mark enjoys cooking and taking care of people, especially during the festive season. In this book he shares a collection of traditional and new Christmas recipes, artisan gifts and fun family games, emphasising the importance of creating cherished memories through food and togetherness.

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Rhondda Greig began her career as a professional artist exhibiting regularly in New Zealand, and has been an invited solo exhibitor in Tokyo, Yokohama and Kyoto. In Scotland she was Artist-in-Residence at the University of Aberdeen. Her works are held in public and private collections in New Zealand and the UK, and in private collections in the United States, France, Australia and Japan. Her previous volume of poetry Eavesdropping with Angels was published by Hazard Press. Her children's books include Matarawa Cats, a diploma winner in the Noma International Concours Children's Book Illustration Award (Japan), which became a New Zealand classic. She has won a number of grants and awards.

Nicholas Lyon Gresson QSM was born in Christchurch in 1939 into one of New Zealand’s best known legal families. He did not become a university trained lawyer, but has lived a life steeped in law and justice. With training in engineering he found his university of life through travel as a ship’s engineer on German ships to North and South America in the military junta days of the 1960s; and living on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait. From there his poetry and writing grew. His interests include photography, art, his Parnell garden, and following sports, particularly Olympic athletics and Formula One. For his community work in mental health and crime prevention he was awarded a Queen’s Service Medal in 1999. His father, Terence Arbuthnot Gresson, was a much-loved judge of the High Court of New Zealand in Auckland.

A regular contributor over the years to several magazines, including New Zealand Gardener, Dennis Greville (1947-2012) also had a number of gardening books to his credit, including Get Fresh, Colourful Gardens and Salads Year-round.

Tim Grgec has master's degrees in English literature and creative writing from Victoria University of Wellington, where he was the 2018 recipient of the Biggs Family Prize for Poetry. His work has appeared in Landfall, The Spinoff, NZ Books, Mimicry, Sweet Mammalian, Turbine, and Starling. All Tito's Children is his first book.

Peter Griffin is a science, technology, and business journalist with more than 20 years of experience in the media. His work has been featured in the New Zealand Herald, The Listener, Stuff, BusinessDesk, and more, and he has appeared numerous times on Radio New Zealand and Newstalk ZB as a tech commentatory. He founded the Science Media Center in Wellington, New Zealand to increase public understanding of local research, science, and innovation, which he ran from 2008 to 2018. He is cohost of BusinessDesk's podcast The Business of Tech. Sir Peter Beck is the founder and CEO of Rocket Lab, a company that designs, builds, and launches advanced rockets and satellites. A self-taught engineer who grew up in a middle-class family and never went to university, Beck founded Rocket Lab in 2006 at the age of 29. His vision was to develop rockets specifically dedicated to launching small satellites. Today, Rocket Lab is a global leader in aerospace, manufacturing one of the world's most-launched rockets and employing over 2000 people.

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No biography