Authors

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Claire Mabey is the founder of Verb Wellington, LitCrawl Wellington and L?emis. She is also books editor at The Spinoff, book critic at RNZ and co-curator of the writers' programme at the Aotearoa NZ Festival of the Arts.

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Bren MacDibble was raised on farms all over New Zealand, backpacked the world in her twenties, stopped off in Australia on the way home and stayed. She lived in Melbourne for twenty years, then travelled Australia living and working in a bus, and now runs holiday villas on the stunning coral coast of Western Australia. In 2018, How to Bee - her first novel for younger readers - won the Children's Book Council Book of the Year Award for Younger Readers, the New South Wales Premier's Literary Award Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children's Literature, and the New Zealand Book Awards Wright Family Foundation Esther Glen Award for Junior Fiction. In 2019 The Dog Runner won the New Zealand Book Awards Wright Family Foundation Esther Glen Award for Junior Fiction. Across the Risen Sea (2020) was shortlisted for multiple awards and nominated for a CILIP Carnegie medal. The Raven's Song (2022), co-written with Zana Fraillon, was an Honour Book for the CBCA Award for Younger Readers. Bren also writes for young adults under the name Cally Black.

Sitting in class late morning in 1974, on hearing a poem by the German poet & novelist Herman Hesse Peter Le Baige felt himself, in his own words, 'infused with a fermented light', and knew his future life would take him crashingly through foreign tongues and language forms and along the madly overgrown paths of poetry, wherever else it led him. Writing and performing poetry since the first session of the legendary 'Poetry Live' weekly poetry readings at the Globe Tavern in Auckland in 1980, his first two collections of poems, 'Breakers', 1979, and 'Street hung with daylit moon', 1986, are now succeeded by his 2023 collection, 'Blackbird in paradise', drawn from pieces written over the past 37 years. He remains lost in the garden still.

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Belinda MacDonald grew up on a lifestyle farm in Cambridge, New Zealand. She was inspired from a young age by her mother and father's self-sufficiency - the garden, plantings, foraging, milking the house cow, and spending hours in the kitchen cooking. Belinda appeared on TV's first My Kitchen Rules NZ series in 2014 and co-won the title with her boldly flavoured cooking combinations. She showcased how food can be rich and indulgent but also fiercely healthy at the same time. From there she became co-author of her first cookbook My Green Kitchen with Neena Truscott. She realised early on that her gift to her children and the community would be to empower them about the importance of nutrition, wellbeing and eating sustainably and seasonally. Since winning MKR, Belinda has influenced the community with local foodie columns, TV appearances, live cooking demonstrations, keto food vlogging, and she also opened New Zealand's first 'pop-up' organic bone broth bar serving wellness shots, tinctures of healing fire cider, and infused butter bombs. Recently she has become a creative culinary consultant for 5 different food establishments, where her passion for sharing is assisting hospitality teams with their seasonal menu designs giving them the 'flavourbomb' treatment, all while supporting local growers and producers.

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