Authors

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John Lewis is a stop motion animator, writer, and director. He is best known as an animator on the feature film Mary and Max, the TV series Kiri & Lou, and the short film The Story of Percival Pilts which he also co-wrote and co-directed. John lives in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he spends his days playing with plasticine dinosaurs, riding an electric unicycle, rock climbing, and being a father.  

Phoebe H. Li holds a PhD from the University of Auckland and was a research fellow at Tsinghua University in Beijing. She is currently an independent historian. She was the principal curator of the acclaimed photographic exhibition Being Chinese in Aotearoa, hosted by the Auckland War Memorial Museum, the Waitangi Treaty Ground Museum, and the New Zealand Portrait Gallery (2017-2020).

No biography

With a PhD in nutritional biochemistry and over 25 years of

Jay Lichter works at a landscaping company and lives in Auckland. He spends his free time searching for and photographing weird and wonderful fungi. 

No biography

Kiri Lightfoot is an NZ-based author and actor. She has worked as a scriptwriter in children's television and as an actor both for theatre and screen. She continues to work part-time in television and also runs poetry reading sessions in aged-care homes and hospitals with charity 'Active Arts'. Kiri worked for many years as a telephone counsellor with Youthline and as a volunteer mentor in an alternative education school. Bear is her first novel for young adults and was inspired by working with young people at this time. Kiri is now a mother of three school-aged children and lives in central Auckland. Her previous books are picture books: Ming's Iceberg, illustrated by Kimberly Andrews (Scholastic 2021) and Every Second Friday, illustrated by Ben Galbraith (Hodder Children's Books 2008), a shortlist in the New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards 2009.

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Barbro Lindgren is a pioneering children’s author from Sweden. Her many awards include the Astrid Lindgren Prize, the Nils Holgersson plaque and the Grand Prize of the Society for the Promotion of Literature. In 2014, she received the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.Eva Eriksson is one of the world’s great illustrators. Her awards include the Astrid Lindgren Prize and the August award and she is consistently nominated for the Hans Christian Andersen and other international awards. Eriksson has illustrated numerous books published by Gecko Press including the internationally popular My Happy Life junior fiction series.