Celebrating Write Across New Zealand alumni
Books published by authors who have attended a Write Across New Zealand retreat
  • Thriller

    Author: Rachel Paris
    Attended: Spring 2024, Spring 2025

    Published by Hachette Aotearoa in March and immediately found its place on several NZ Fiction bestseller lists. The book is a twisty thriller that centres on the billionaire Turner dynasty and has been described as Succession meets Big Little Lies. Rachel returned to take part in the Spring 2025 retreat, where she worked on her highly anticipated second novel.

  • Short stories

    Author: Michelle Duff
    Attended: Spring 2024

    Michelle Duff’s astonishingly good short story collection Surplus Women was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in March 2025. Her cast of hungry teenage girls, top detectives who forget to buy milk, frustrated archivists, duplicitous real estate agents, and ‘surplus women’, are all as vivid as wafts of Impulse from a backpack in the 90s.
  • Historical fiction

    Author: JM Laird
    Attended: Autumn 2024

    In 1838, when Mary Bumby's brother decided to travel from England to be a missionary in New Zealand, she accompanied him, along with two hives of live bees on the arduous six-month journey. When they landed in the Hokianga, she became New Zealand's first beekeeper. This story is based on Mary's diary and accounts by those who knew her.
  • Fantasy

    Author: Claire Mabey
    Attended: 2021

    Published by Allen & Unwin, Claire Mabey's debut middle-grade novel won the NZSA Best First Book Award at the 2025 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults, the NZ Booklovers Award for Best Junior Fiction Book 2025 and was shortlisted for several other awards. It tells the story of three friends and a one-eyed raven who find themselves up against the rulers who restrict the gifts of writing and reading to an elite few.

  • Magical realism

    Author: Rachael King
    Attended: 2021

    Winner of the 2025 Hadyn & Rollett Children's Booksellers' Choice Award and the 2025 NZ Booklovers Award for Best Junior Fiction Book, The Grimmelings is a story of Ella and what happens when the boy she has cursed goes missing, in the same sudden, unexplained way as her father several years earlier, and she discovers that her family is living in the shadow of a vengeful kelpie, a black horse-like creature.
  • Historical fiction

    Author: Jeena Murphy
    Attended: Spring 2023, Spring 2025

    Set in France in 1933, Rue de Paradis is the first book in the Semiramis Queen of Heaven trilogy. It tells the story Yvette, who flees to Paris with her younger sister Janie to protect her from the village predator. They find sanctuary with their cousin Daniel at the prestigious Blum Foundry, where Yvette's love of sculpting grows.
  • Self-help

    Author: Dr Kerry Makin-Byrd
    Attended: Spring 2024

    Hachette Aotearoa published Dr Kerry Makin-Bird’s second book, Start Here: A Practical Guide for the Overwhelmed, in November 2025. In the book, Kerry distills a century of science into a three-step recipe for treating burnout: soothe, transcend, then move. A burnout survivor herself, Kerry previously published a poetic memoir, The Ballad of Burnout.

What past retreat participants say