Authors

Bob Darroch (Author) Bob Darroch has been drawing cartoons for most of his life. His work has appeared on toys, jigsaws, souvenirs and postcards and in newspapers and magazines worldwide. He started writing and illustrating his own books for children in 1999. In 2001, the first of the popular Little Kiwi stories was published. Little Kiwi is Scared of the Dark has since been awarded the Storylines Gaelyn Gordon Award for a Much-loved Book. Bob has illustrated books for other authors, including for his wife, Ruth. Bob and Ruth live in Temuka, South Canterbury. Stacey Morrison (Translator) Stacey Morrison (Te Arawa, Ngai Tahu) is a radio and TV broadcaster whose projects have spanned 25 years. She is also a mama to three young tamariki who have been brought up with te reo Maori as their mother tongue. Stacey herself didn't learn to speak Maori until she was an adult. It required a lot of research, determination, wonderful mentors and the support of a community to achieve her goal of becoming fluent by the time her children were born. Stacey and her husband Scotty co-wrote Maori at Home to help other families use te reo in everyday settings, and Stacey's book for children, My First Words in Maori illustrated by Ali Teo, was a number one bestseller. As a winner of Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Maori Champion Award in 2016 and a graduate of Te Panekiretanga o te Reo (the Institute of Excellence in Maori Language), Stacey loves encouraging the learning and use of our country's beautiful native language.

Ash Davida Jane's poetry has appeared in Mimicry, Sweet Mammalian, Starling, The Spinoff, and elsewhere. Her first book, Every Dark Waning, was published in 2016 by UK indie publisher Platypus Press. She lives in Wellington, where she works as a bookseller.

Poet, essayist and fiction writer Lynn Davidson grew up in Pukerua Bay, Wellington. She is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Islander (Te Herenga Waka University Press and Shearsman), a novel, essays and short stories. Lynn had a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2013 and a Bothy Project Residency in the Cairngorms in 2016. She won the Poetry New Zealand Poetry Award in 2020, and was 2021 Creative New Zealand Randell Cottage Writer in Residence. In 2023 she was the Mike Riddell Writer in Residence in Ōtūrēhua, Central Otago. Lynn calls Aotearoa New Zealand and Scotland home.

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Joy's debut book, Witch's Cat Wanted Apply Within, published by Scholastic New Zealand, won the coveted 2015 Joy Cowley award followed by a Storylines Notable book award in 2017. The book has now been adapted for the stage by the renowned Christchurch Children's Theatre, and as an audio story on air by Radio New Zealand. Joy's books are enjoyed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada the USA and by translation in Scandinavia.

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Rachel Davis and Angela Meyer are financial behavioural experts who run Hi Money, a business aimed at educating and empowering women when it comes to their relationship with money.

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Nick Davies is an actor-turned-writer from Wellington, New Zealand who has appeared internationally in both film and on TV. He has written a collection of travel stories entitled The Lost Gringo Chronicles and has worked as a freelance contributor on Mexico for The Dominion Post.

No biography

Chris Davies Curtis was born in Yorkshire England, and spent her school years in Stratford-upon-Avon with her parents and elder brother David. She then trained to be a registered nurse, meeting her future husband on a pony trekking holiday. Four years after marrying Londoner, Ken they moved to the British Channel Isle of Sark. After about seven years of running a guest house and smallholding they decided to explore New Zealand in a Bedford van for two years, taking young son Roy with them. Various jobs paid the way, and they returned to Sark to lease their property and emigrate back to New Zealand. Here Chris became a rural District Nurse. Sadly the marriage ended and Chris returned to Sark, where she lived with a partner for 17 years, until he died of a brain tumour. She now lives north of Auckland, near her son and family. Writing has always been a hobby (her father was a short story writer), and she has now published four 'memoirs' about her eventful life. Now she is writing Medical Romances, using some of her own experiences. They are proving popular in the UK, published by D C Thomson's Pocket Novels. She was commissioned to write Historical novel for her local Anglican church's centenary celebrations in 2017 which carries the history of parts of New Zealand as well as the church through the eyes of fictional characters. Writing in the Fantasy genre, she has also published 'The Healing Hands,' telling the story of a nurse who is sent back to the Second World War, to cope with powers planning to introduce a virus secreted from the Spanish 'flu of 1918.

Dan Davin was a New Zealand Rhodes Scholar who became Academic Publisher at the Clarendon Press in Oxford. Throughout his career, in his spare time, he wrote both fiction and works of memoir, from his war novel For the Rest of Their Lives (1947) and Southland novel Roads from Home (1949) to his collection of war stories The Salamander and the Fire (1986). Janet Wilson is Reader in English at University College, Northhampton and editor of the Journal for Postcolonial Writing. She has contributed to the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature and edited Intimate Strangers - Reminiscences of Dan Davin.