Authors

Teaching is the last thing Taranga Kent ever thought she would do when she left school to work in an office. A chance meeting with a teacher trainee at her child's school Christmas party years later inspired her to give it a go. She now has over two decades of teaching behind her. Taranga began to write for pure enjoyment, with thoughts most often coming to her as she lay in bed waiting for sleep to come. These late night efforts would end up on scraps of paper in a drawer with no intention of them ever being seen by anyone else. Joining a local writers' group and receiving positive feedback on her work from others led her to consider getting published as a realistic possibility. Not Just A Teacher is the long-awaited result.

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Bob Kerr has written and illustrated a range of picture books for children. Kerr’s own junior novel, The Optimist (1992), about sailing misadventures, won the 1993 Best First Children’s Book Award. He published a collection of short stories for 8 to 12-year-olds in 1998, Strange Tales from the Mall, which was short-listed for the 1999 New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards. His pictorial history book, After the War (2000), was short-listed for the 2001 New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards. Biography and photo courtesy of Read NZ.

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Rachel Kerr is a Wellington writer who lives in Island Bay with her family. She is studying te reo Māori and has degrees in film and creative writing. Rachel has worked as a librarian for Te Kooti Whenua Māori and Judicial Libraries. Victory Park is her first novel.

Ulrika Kestere is a photographer, illustrator and graphic designer based in Lund, Sweden. Her first children’s book was translated into multiple languages, and Otto Goes North is her second book. Kestere was born in Latvia. She loves the outdoors and the rough Scandinavian weather, and Norway’s Lofoten islands inspire many of her illustrations.

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Jacquie Kidd, Ngapuhi, is a nurse by training and a researcher at heart. She has spent decades examining inequities and racism in the health system and uses story and poetry to bring whanau voices to the forefront of cancer care and research. A professor of Maori health at the Auckland University of Technology, Jacquie has a clinical background in nursing and almost two decades of expertise in whanau-focused Maori health equity research. Her research has concentrated on kaupapa Maori projects that have gathered whanau stories to help develop solutions to health inequities. Significant projects that Jacquie has worked on include health literacy for Maori in palliative care; Oranga Tu, on prostate cancer for tane Maori; and Ha Ora, on improving early diagnosis of lung cancer for Maori. Her current work includes lung cancer screening for Maori, whanau hauora assess ment in the cancer pathway and anti-racism practice in healthcare. She is a trustee and co-chair of Hei Ahuru Mowai, the Maori Cancer Leadership group, and a keynote speaker at the World Indigenous Cancer Conference in Aotearoa in 2026. Jacquie lives in Ahuriri Napier with her husband and two dogs, just a short drive from her five mokopuna.

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