Authors

Tania McCartney is an author, editor, reviewer and features writer. She has been writing professionally for over 25 years and has almost a thousand articles and reviews in print and online. Passionate about literacy, Tania founded the highly regarded children’s literature website Kids’ Book Review and the 52-Week Illustration Challenge, and is an ambassador for the Australian National Year of Reading 2012. She has spent many years presenting and speaking on reading, books and writing. Her previous book with Tina Snerling was the bestselling An Aussie Year. Tania is also the author of the very successful Beijing Tai Tai. Described as ‘The Eat, Pray, Love for mothers’, this is her account of the four years she spent living in China’s capital. Tania has also lived in Paris and London, and currently lives in Canberra with her husband and two kids, and a mountain of books. Tina Snerling is an illustrator, children’s wear designer and graphic artist. Formerly a fashion and textiles designer, she now illustrates the award-winning Kids’ Year series and other picture books, and is the Art Director for a children’s stationery company. She lives in Brisbane with her husband, two kids and a wild imagination to draw the world with childhood innocence.

In the early eighties Sue McCauley’s first novel, Other Halves, won both the Goodman Fielder Wattie and New Zealand Book Awards for fiction. It was reprinted numerous times, in New Zealand and overseas, selling in excess of 20,000 copies, and was made into a film. In subsequent years Sue wrote four more novels, two short story collections and a biography. She has also written drama for stage and TV and adapted her own novel for the film Other Halves. That, Sue’s first book, was loosely based on the early — and unconventional — relationship between Sue and her now husband, Pat, who these days live on a farm near Dannevirke. They have been together for fifty years.

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Lynn McConnell completed a Master of Arts in History in 2017 after a lifetime in newspaper and digital journalism. He has 25 books to his credit. These include: Something to Crow About (the centennial history of Southland rugby), Galatas 1941: Courage in Vain, Behind the Silver Fern (two editions), Chats (The autobiography of Ewen Chatfield), Living the Dream (The autobiography of Mils Muliaina), McKechnie, Double All Black (the autobiography of Brian McKechnie and Grand Larseny (the 1999 World Cup Cricket diary of Gavin Larsen.

Olivia McCord is a passionate home gardener, freelance writer for gardening magazines, and the founder of Crawford Road, a cut flower seed business. After starting her career in beauty marketing, Olivia discovered her true calling when she transformed a bare land project into an organic kiwifruit orchard and edible flower farm. A self-taught gardener, Olivia later gained qualifications in horticulture and has built a career around growing and arranging flowers. Now, she shares her knowledge to inspire fellow gardeners. A busy mum of two, Olivia enjoys rural life, growing and cooking with seasonal produce, and studying garden design through the English Gardening School in London.

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Jo McCready grew up on the rain-soaked streets of small-town Scotland before moving to the sunnier climes of Auckland, New Zealand in 2010. She has a background in psychology and a lifetime love of mystery and murder.

Athol McCredie is Curator Photography at Te Papa, where he has worked since 2001. He has been involved with photography as a researcher, curator and photographer since the 1970s. His publications include Brian Brake: Lens on the world (editor, 2010), New Zealand Photography Collected (2015) and The New Photography: New Zealand's first generation of documentary photographers (2019).