Authors

Olive Jones is one of the founding members of the Graham Downs community, an arable farm purchased near Motueka in the late 1970s. From her teens to her early 30s Olive lived off this land, cultivating self-sufficiency as a way of life, learning to grow and process food, build a house, and farm animals. Her resulting life-long interest in intentional communities has led Olive to study community cultures around the world and resulted in a PhD that documents long-lived intentional communities in New Zealand. Olive continues to be associated with the Graham Downs community, through her role as a trustee of the Renaissance Community Trust that owns Graham Downs.

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Lloyd Jones is an award-winning fiction writer. His first collection of short stories was published in 1991, and he has also written books for children. His bestselling novel Mister Pip won several illustrious prizes and awards including the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award and the 2007 Montana Medal for fiction. It was also shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize. He has written numerous novels, and has worked as a journalist and consultant. Jones’ writing is known to subvert the norms of fiction, and his narratives are challenging, original, and in some cases controversial. Bio and photo courtesy of Read NZ.

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Jan Jordan became the first woman criminology lecturer at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington in 1989 and was appointed as a professor before retiring from teaching in 2020, when she became emerita professor. Her research has focused on how women's lives and the justice system intersect, and in 2022 she published 'Tackling Rape Culture' and 'Women, Rape and Justice' (2022). Jan lives in Waikawa Beach with her partner, Chris, and dog, Willow.

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Tokerau brings extensive leadership experience to this work of practical theology. He has been an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand for 24 years serving in mostly ethnically and culturally diverse congregations. He is of Cook Islands, Scottish, and English heritage, a husband to Tangi, father of five children, and grandfather to seven grandchildren.

MK Joseph published six novels internationally including A Soldier’s Tale which was made into a highly-regarded New Zealand film. He also published three collections of poetry and several critical works, amongst them Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein which was reprinted by Oxford World Classics in 2008. He was a Professor at the University of Auckland for over twenty years, and served in the infantry during WWII experiencing heavy fighting in the infamous ‘Battle of the Bulge’ amongst other campaigns.

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