Authors: In Conversation

Join us!

We are hosting a very special event on Sunday, November 13th at 2pm. An afternoon session: in conversation with four Children and Young Adult authors.

They will be discussing their latest books and their writing journeys. Find more about the authors attending below.

Tickets are free, we just need to know that you’re coming!

Johanna Emeney teaches creative writing at Massey University, where she gained her PhD. She has published three books of poetry: Apple & Tree (2011), Family History (2017), and Felt (2021), and an academic book, The Rise of Autobiographical Medical Poetry and the Medical Humanities (2018). Johanna lives on a lifestyle block in North Auckland with her husband and a menagerie of animals.

Eileen Merriman’s first young adult novel, Pieces of You, was published in 2017, and was a finalist in the NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults and a Storylines Notable Book. Since then, a stream of novels for adults and young adults have followed. She has received huge critical praise, with one reviewer saying: ‘Merriman is an instinctive storyteller with an innate sense of timing.’ In addition to being a regular finalist in the NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults, Merriman was a finalist in the 2021 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel and Moonlight Sonata was longlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction 2020. Editions of some of her young adult novels have been released in Germany, Turkey and the UK and three have been optioned for film or TV, including the Black Spiral Trilogy. Her latest YA release, Indigo Moon, is the first in the Eternity Spiral
series, and has been described as ‘Kazuo Ishiguro meets Hunger Games’. Eileen works as a consultant haematologist at North Shore Hospital.

Sonya Wilson is an award-winning novelist, journalist, television reporter, presenter and producer.

She has a Masters in Creative Writing with First Class Honours from the University of Auckland. Her first novel, Spark Hunter, has made several bestsellers and best-of lists since its release in October 2021. It won the NZSA Best First Book Award at the 2022 NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults, was shortlisted for the Esther Glen Junior Fiction prize, and was a finalist for Best Youth Novel at the 2022 Sir Julius Vogel Awards. ​

​She is the founder and Chief Executive of the charity Kiwi Christmas Books (www.kiwichristmasbooks.org.nz
and is the co-director of a small film and television post-production company with her husband,
colourist Pete Ritchie.

Peter Gilderdale began life as a children’s literature crash-test dummy. His mother, Betty, reviewed children’s books for the Herald, and Peter was a willing guinea pig throughout his childhood. With writer/artist parents, who would famously team up to write the Little Yellow Digger, Peter has spent his life trying to reconcile the visual and the verbal. He taught Graphic Designers for over 30 years at AUT and has worked professionally as a calligrapher (he was recently Benedict Cumberbatch’s writing double on Power of the Dog). He is a trained art/design historian and writes boring articles on things like seventeenth century Dutch calligraphy, Edwardian postcards and early New Zealand Christmas cards. He has written poetry for his own pleasure throughout his life but never planned on continuing his parent’s Digger legacy until a series of happy accidents led him back to children’s literature. Peter and his family live on the Shore, and he and his dog Charlie (a star of Peter’s latest book)
can be seen most mornings walking on Campbells Bay beach.

About the authors: