Authors

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Born in 1940 and growing up in the post-war years the attributes of persistence, honesty and integrity and the importance of caring for those around you were the fundamental building blocks of life. ;After attending a country school and the small newly established High School at Waitara he was involved in a series of moves through a Government office, the office of a private company and farming before attending Palmerston North Teachers College in 1960. After just over five years in the teaching profession he married and changed career going dairy farming for the next forty years.; During this time both Peter and his wife spent many years leading Christian Youth work and were involved with the local school especially when it came to the school jubilees and writing of the school’s history. Poring over old family diaries in the evenings became an absorbing occupation, at times realising at some unearthly hour of the night that it was 1970 not 1870 and there were cows to milk in the morning.; Thus a fascination with the history of the early settlement and their ancestor’s lives began. This quickly widened to the whole district and all the families that he could trace. There are some significant pa sites in the districts that have been written about and some stories of the early Maori have been recorded. The first Europeans in the district were mostly soldiers discharged from the Military and in some cases were family members.; On retirement from active farming he spent about fifteen years as a First Responder for St John Ambulance service as well as pursuing his hobby that was almost becoming a full time occupation of gathering and writing the stories of the people in the districts in which he lived.; This culminated in the publishing of several small booklets for the school jubilees and the publication of a major work on the district he grew up and taught in Lepperton in 2012 which was reprinted as a 2nd edition in 2020; “Even the Dogs Have Forgotten to Bark”.

Simon Wilson is one of New Zealand's best-known journalists. The former editor of Cuisine and Metro magazines and Auckland editor for The Spinoff, he is now a senior writer at The New Zealand Herald. He is a regular writer on urban and social issues. Professor Deidre Brown (Ngapuhi, Ngati Kahu) is an art historian and architectural lecturer. She is head of the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of Auckland and a governor of the Arts Foundation of New Zealand, a member of the Maori Trademarks Advisory Committee of the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand, and a member of the Humanities Panel of the Marsden Fund. In 2021 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Aparangi. Dr Karamia Muller is a Pacific academic who lectures at the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of Auckland. Her research specialises in the meaningful 'indigenisation' of creative practices and design methodologies invested in building futures resistant to inequality.

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John Wilson MNZM was raised in Timaru and Christchurch and graduated from the University of Canterbury with an MA (first class honours in history) in 1966. He went on to study in the United States, earning his PhD in Chinese history from Harvard University. After his return to Christchurch in 1974 he worked as a leader writer for the Christchurch Press and as the founding editor of the magazine of the New Zealand Historic Places Trust. He has written local histories of two Canterbury rural areas, Cheviot and Waikakahi, and of the Christchurch suburb of Addington. He has also written extensively about the historic buildings of Christchurch and Banks Peninsula. When ‘old Christchurch’ was largely demolished after the Canterbury earthquakes of 2010–11 he moved to Arthur’s Pass, where he had tramped and climbed in his youth. He was awarded the Canterbury History Foundation Rhodes Medal in 2002 and the J.M. Sherrard Award in New Zealand Regional and Local History in 1994.

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Brett Wilson lives in Hamilton with his wife, son and daughter. He is an active musician and songwriter, playing at bars and restaurants, corporate events, weddings and at Activate Church, the church he grew up in. After nearly 20 years of teaching music at tertiary level, Brett now works as Communications Co-ordinator at CBS, his brother’s Hamilton-based health IT company.

Kelly Wilson is the bestselling author of five autobiographical non-fiction books-For the Love of Horses, Stallion Challenges, Mustang Ride, Saving the Snowy Brumbies and Taming the Wild, a children's picture book Ranger the Kaimanawa Stallion and the junior chapter book series Showtym Adventures. With her sisters Vicki and Amanda, Kelly has starred in the hit-rating TV series, Keeping Up with the Kaimanawas, following their work taming New Zealand's wild Kaimanawa horses, and travelled to America and Australia to rescue and tame wild horses.

Kelly Wilson (Author) Kelly Wilson is the bestselling author of five autobiographical non-fiction books- For the Love of Horses, Stallion Challenges, Mustang Ride, Saving the Snowy Brumbies and Taming the Wild, a children's picture book Ranger the Kaimanawa Stallion and the junior chapter book series Showtym Adventures. With her sisters Vicki and Amanda, Kelly starred in the hit-rating TV series, Keeping Up with the Kaimanawas, following their work taming New Zealand's wild Kaimanawa horses, and travelled around the globe to document, rescue and tame wild horses. Amanda Wilson (Author) Amanda Wilson is one of New Zealand's top showjumping riders, having won and placed in many national titles including Pony of the Year and Horse of the Year. With her sisters Vicki and Kelly, Amanda starred in the hit-rating TV series, Keeping Up with the Kaimanawas, following their work taming New Zealand's wild Kaimanawa horses, and also travelled to America and Australia to rescue and tame wild horses. Her life with horses features in her sister Kelly Wilson's bestselling books For the Love of Horses, Stallion Challenges, Mustang Ride and Saving the Snowy Brumbies, a children's picture book Ranger the Kaimanawa Stallion and the junior chapter-book series Showtym Adventures. With Kelly, Amanda has co-written a middle-grade novel, Showtym Viking.

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As an under-graduate student Kerry-Jayne Wilson stood on the cliffs of the sub-Antarctic Snares Islands and watched penguins, shearwaters, petrels and albatrosses head out to sea and wondered where they went, how they caught food and how they navigated the open ocean. These questions have intrigued her ever since and led her to undertake conservation-related research on seabirds in New Zealand, the Chathams and sub-Antarctic Islands, the Southern Ocean, Antarctica, Newfoundland and briefly in several other parts of the world. She was a senior lecturer in ecology and conservation at Lincoln University for many years and has worked for the last 12 years as an ornithologist, natural-history writer and educator. 'New Zealand Seabirds' is her fourth book. In 2019 she was made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM) for services to seabird conservation. She lives on the South Island's West Coast