Authors

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Jeanne Bernhardt (b.1961), a contemporary New Zealand writer, has published seven book of poetry and prose, and has travelled extensively, working both in New Zealand and overseas. In 1997 she was awarded the Louis Johnson New Writer’s Bursary from Creative NZ and in 2016 she received the Earl of Seacliff Poetry Prize. After publishing Vorare Lacuna (1996), baby is this wonderland? (1999) and The Snow Poems/your self of lost ground (2002), she left New Zealand for the United States. She returned to publish a series of well-received books: The Deaf Man’s Chorus (poetry, ESAW), Wood (short prose), 26 Poems and Fast Down Turk (a novel), these latter three were with Dean Havard’s hand-printed Kilmog Press. In 2018, Tangerine Press published Bernhardt’s hand-bound Silver City and Two More (short stories) in the UK.

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With an anthropology and teaching background, often working with children in trouble, the author has encountered many women like Amber. Personal lived experiences also inform the characters in

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Jonathan Besser (born 1949) is a classical composer who has been involved in the New Zealand music and arts community since the 70s. Working across a range of disciplines, Besser has been the Composer in Residence for the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra and he was the Mozart Fellow at the University of Otago. He has formed several bands, including Free Radicals, Bravura and The Zestniks, playing classical music, jazz and klezmer. Besser has written original scores for the New Zealand Quartet and the Royal New Zealand Ballet’s Jean: The Ballet of Jean Batten. Jonathan is now in his seventies and lives in Mt Eden, Auckland.

Elsdon Best was born at Porirua in 1856, later moving to Wellington with this family. He passed the junior civil service examination and entered the office of the Registrar-General. Indoor life did not appeal to the young man. He worked on a sheep station in Poverty Bay, joined the constabulary at the time of the Parihaka affair, spent some time in Hawai'i, California and Texas, returned to New Zealand, and after working for several years in the Urewera country joined the Lands and Survey Department. During this period, while living among the Tuhoe people, he filled endless notebooks with information which took shape in the present book. Eventually he became an officer of the Dominion Museum, where he compiled the many bulletins, monographs, and ethnological papers for which he is famous. He was a foundation member of the Polynesian Society, and in 1914 was awarded the Hector medal for research in ethnology. Nine years before his death in 1931, Sir Apirana Ngata said of him, 'There is not a member of the Maori race who is fit to wipe the boots of Elsdon Best in the matter of knowledge of the lore of the race to which we belong.'

Ursula Bethell stands with R.A.K. Mason at the beginnings of modern poetry in New Zealand. Born in England, she grew up in New Zealand but did not live there until the 1920s when she came back finally to Christchurch. There she established a garden and began, at the age of fifty, to write poetry. ‘New Zealand wasn’t truly discovered,’ said D’Arcy Cresswell, ‘until Ursula Bethell, “very earnestly digging”, raised her head to look at the mountains.’

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