Kelley Tantau

Described as 'an exciting new writer' by NZ Booklovers, Kelley Tantau is an award-winning New Zealand journalist and author of The Runaway Man.

In 2023, she was named Best Senior News Journalist at the Community Newspaper Awards, and Runner-Up Best Community Reporter at the NZ Voyager Media Awards.

The Runaway Man is her debut novel and tells the story of Nick Greene, who voluntarily disappears. When Nick's missing persons case turns into a manhunt, he'll begin to question whether his efforts to start a new life were worth it.

"Tantau’s writing style is nothing short of exceptional. Her vivid descriptions not only bring the New Zealand landscape to life but also provide insight into the internal struggles of her characters."
- Lost in Booklan

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Total similar authors (18)

Vanessa Diffenbaugh

VANESSA DIFFENBAUGH was born in San Francisco and raised in Chico, California. After graduating from Stanford University, she worked in the non-profit sector, teaching art and technology to youth in low-income communities. Following the success of her debut novel, The Language of Flowers, she co-founded Camellia Network (now Lifeset Network), a non-profit whose mission is to connect every youth aging out of foster care to the critical resources, opportunities, and support they need to thrive in adulthood. She currently lives in Monterey, CA, with her husband and four children.

Follow Vanessa at facebook.com/vanessadiffenbaugh

Follow Vanessa on Twitter @VDiffenbaugh

Follow Vanessa on Instagram @vanessadiffenbaugh
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Charlotte Lobb

Charlotte Lobb was born and raised on a lifestyle block just out of Hamilton, in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Charlotte kept busy in her earlier years with interests and talents ranging from ballroom dancing, violin, piano and singing, to being a member of the NZ Shooting Team and High Performance Academy for air-rifle shooting.

After leaving school, Charlotte completed a Bachelor in Speech and Language Therapy (Hons) at the University of Canterbury. She now lives in Tauranga, in the sunny Bay of Plenty, with her husband, two children and their fluffy cat.

Along with her passion for words, Charlotte has a desire to bring mental health topics out into the open, and to provide hope for those in need. 'Hannah & Huia' is Charlotte’s debut novel.
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Jenny Pattrick

Jenny Pattrick is an acclaimed historical novelist, whose The Denniston Rose, and its sequel Heart of Coal, are among New Zealand's bestselling novels. In 2009 she received the New Zealand Post Mansfield Fellowship. She has been active in the arts community, and has also written stories, songs and shows for children.

Jenny Pattrick has been awarded the OBE for services to the arts, the 1990 medal, is featured in the Wellington Girls' College Hall of Fame and has received the NZ Post Katherine Mansfield Prize.
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Catherine Chidgey

Catherine Chidgey is a novelist and short story writer whose work has been published to international acclaim. In a Fishbone Church won Best First Book at the New Zealand Book Awards and at the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in her region. In the UK it won the Betty Trask Award and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Golden Deeds was Time Out’s book of the year, a Notable Book of the Year in The New York Times and a Best Book in the LA Times. She has won the Prize in Modern Letters, the Katherine Mansfield Award, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, the Janet Frame Fiction Prize, and the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize for The Wish Child. Remote Sympathy was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fictio
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Carl Nixon

Carl Nixon is a playwright, a short story writer and a novelist. He has written original plays and has adapted Lloyd Jones’ novel The Book of Fame and JM Coetzee's Disgrace.

Born in Christchurch, Nixon graduated with a Masters degree in Religious Studies from Canterbury University. He briefly taught secondary school English before leaving to teach in Japan for two years.

He has won numerous awards for his fiction, including winning and being nominated for key short story competitions.

Nixon was the Ursula Bethell/Creative New Zealand Writer in Residence at Canterbury University in 2006, where he completed his first novel, Rocking Horse Road. He has also written numerous plays for children.

2017 recipient of the Mansfield Menton Fellowship, wi
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V.V. Ganeshananthan

V. V. Ganeshananthan is the author of Brotherless Night and Love Marriage, which was longlisted for the Women's Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications. A former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association, she has also served on the board of Asian American Writers' Workshop, and is presently a member of the board of directors of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota and co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of l
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Charity Norman

Charity was born in Uganda, brought up in draughty vicarages in Yorkshire and Birmingham, met her future husband under a lorry in the Sahara. She worked as a barrister in York Chambers, until - realising that her three children had barely met her - she moved with her family to New Zealand and began to write.

After the Fall/Second Chances was a Richard & Judy and World Book Night title, The New Woman/ The Secret Life of Luke Livingstone a BBC Radio 2 choice. See You in September (2017) was shortlisted in the Ngaio Marsh Awards. The Secrets of Strangers was a Radio 2 choice and shortlisted for the Ngaio Marsh and Ned Kelly Awards. Her seventh, Remember Me, was published in March 2022.
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Pip Adam

PIP ADAM gained an MA in Creative Writing with Distinction from Victoria University in 2007. Her work has appeared in Sport, Glottis, Turbine, Lumiere Reader, Hue & Cry, Landfall and Blackmail Press. Her work has also appeared in publications produced in conjunction with two exhibitions at the Wellington City Art Gallery and her reviews have appeared in Metro. She is currently working toward her PhD Creative Writing at Victoria University. Her PhD project explores how engineers describe the built environment. She is using this research to write stories about our relationships with built forms and the structures that hold them up.

Everything We Hoped For won the NZ Post Best First Book Award in 2011 and is an unusually strong first book, dist
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Catherine Lea

Catherine lives with a rescue dog who's the love of her life. In past lives, she has sold international satellite capacity, worked in IT recruitment, and run her own communications store.

When Catherine isn't writing, she's dog-wrangling, wrestling with technology, or going crazy trying to maintain control of the yard.

THE CANDIDATE'S DAUGHTER is her first published work, followed by the sequel in the Elizabeth McClaine series, CHILD OF THE STATE, and A STOLEN WOMAN.

Her latest book in the DI NYREE BRADSHAW SERIES, set in the beautiful Far North of New Zealand, is THE DEEPER THE DEAD: A DI Nyree Bradshaw Crime Thriller, out now.

She also writes gritty thrillers under the pen name C.J. Lea.

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Fiona Sussman

Award-winning author Fiona Sussman was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and immigrated to New Zealand over thirty years ago. A former family doctor, she hung up her stethoscope in 2003 to pursue another long-held dream, to write.

Published internationally, she is the author of four novels and numerous critically- acclaimed short stories.

Her novel 'The Last Time We Spoke' won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel 2017 and was shortlisted for the NZ Heritage Prize 2016. An early draft won the Kobo/NZ Society of Authors Publishing Prize.

'Addressed to Greta' launched Bateman Books’ fiction list and went on to win the NZ Booklovers Award for Best Adult Fiction 2021.

'The Doctor's Wife', her fourth novel (and first in the Bandara/Stark ser
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Nikki Crutchley

After seven years of working as a librarian in New Zealand and overseas, Nikki now works as a freelance proofreader and copy editor. She lives in the small Waikato town of Cambridge in New Zealand with her husband and two girls.
Nikki has been writing on and off her whole life and before she turned to crime writing had success in flash fiction. She has been published in 'Bonsai: Best Small Fictions from Aotearoa New Zealand', and 'Fresh Ink' anthologies.
Crime/thriller/mystery novels are her passion. 'Nothing Bad Happens Here', her first novel, is set on the Coromandel Coast of New Zealand. It was a finalist in the 2018 Ngaio Marsh Award for best first novel.
Nikki's second book, 'No One Can Hear You', was long-listed for the Ngaio Marsh Awa
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Trent Dalton

Trent Dalton writes for the award-winning The Weekend Australian Magazine. A former assistant editor of The Courier-Mail, he has won a Walkley, been a four-time winner of the national News Awards Feature Journalist of the Year Award, and was named Queensland Journalist of the Year at the 2011 Clarion Awards for excellence in Queensland media. His writing includes several short and feature-length film screenplays. His latest feature film screenplay, Home, is a love story inspired by his non-fiction collection Detours: Stories from the Street (2011), the culmination of three months immersed in Brisbane's homeless community, the proceeds of which went back to the 20 people featured within its pages. His journalism has twice been nominated for
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J.P. Pomare

J. P. Pomare is a New Zealand author who lives in Melbourne, Australia.

He is the author of a number of critically acclaimed and best-selling novels including Seventeen Years Later, Tell Me Lies, and The Wrong Woman.

His novel In The Clearing was adapted for the screen as an eight part miniseries by Disney (The Clearing) and The Last Guests (Watching You) has been adapted as a series by Stan.
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Becky Manawatu

Becky Manawatu (Ngāi Tahu) was born in Nelson in 1982, raised in Waimangaroa and has returned there to live with her family. She worked as a reporter for The News in Westport.

Becky’s short story ‘Abalone’ was long-listed for the 2018 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, her essay ‘Mothers Day’ has been selected for the Landfall anthology Strong Words.

Auē is her first novel & it won both the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction and the Hubert Church Prize for best first book of fiction at the 2020 Ockham Book Awards.

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Caroline Barron

Caroline Barron is an award-winning author and sought-after host of literary events. Her debut novel, Golden Days (Affirm Press, Australia / Hachette, New Zealand, 2023), was praised by Woman’s Day as ‘a riveting read that also acts as a nostalgic ode to growing up in Auckland in the ’90s’. Her memoir, Ripiro Beach (Bateman Books, 2020), won the New Zealand Heritage Literary Award for Best Non-fiction Book.

She holds a Masters in Creative Writing from University of Auckland (2015) plus a journalism degree and, in a previous life, owned and ran Nova—a leading model and talent agency.
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Charlotte Lobb

Charlotte Lobb was born and raised on a lifestyle block just out of Hamilton, in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Charlotte kept busy in her earlier years with interests and talents ranging from ballroom dancing, violin, piano and singing, to being a member of the NZ Shooting Team and High Performance Academy for air-rifle shooting.

After leaving school, Charlotte completed a Bachelor in Speech and Language Therapy (Hons) at the University of Canterbury. She now lives in Tauranga, in the sunny Bay of Plenty, with her husband, two children and their fluffy cat.

Along with her passion for words, Charlotte has a desire to bring mental health topics out into the open, and to provide hope for those in need. 'Hannah & Huia' is Charlotte’s debut novel.
Buy books on Amazon
Anne Tiernan

Dr Anne Tiernan is a leading Australian scholar in public policy. Her career spans higher education, federal and state government, consultancy and teaching. Now managing director of mission-led consultancy firm Constellation Impact Advisory, Anne consults regularly to organisations committed to purpose and positive impact. She has written extensively on the political–administrative interface, governmental transitions, policy capacity and executive advisory arrangements. Her publications include The Oxford Handbook of Australian Politics (co-edited with Professor Jenny Lewis, 2021), Lessons in Governing: A Profile of Prime Ministers’ Chiefs of Staff and The Gatekeepers: Lessons from Prime Ministers’ Chiefs of Staff (both with RAW Rhodes, Mel
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Caroline Barron

Caroline Barron is an award-winning author and sought-after host of literary events. Her debut novel, Golden Days (Affirm Press, Australia / Hachette, New Zealand, 2023), was praised by Woman’s Day as ‘a riveting read that also acts as a nostalgic ode to growing up in Auckland in the ’90s’. Her memoir, Ripiro Beach (Bateman Books, 2020), won the New Zealand Heritage Literary Award for Best Non-fiction Book.

She holds a Masters in Creative Writing from University of Auckland (2015) plus a journalism degree and, in a previous life, owned and ran Nova—a leading model and talent agency.
Buy books on Amazon