Finalist in the 2011 New Zealand Post Book Awards - General Non-fiction category

Paula Green (1955-) was born in Auckland. She graduated from Wellington Teachers College and from the University of Auckland (MA Hons, PhD Italian). She has taught creative writing courses, and in primary schools and at university level. She has published six poetry collections including two for children and several storybooks including Aunt Concertina and her Niece Evalina (Random House, 2009). Her latest poetry collection, Slip Stream will be published by AUP (October, 2010). She was the 2005 University of Auckland Literary Fellow and curated Poetry on the Pavement for the Auckland City Council in the same year. She edited Best New Zealand Poems 2007. Green is the poetry reviewer for the New Zealand Herald and regularly visits schools through the New Zealand Book Council's Writers in Schools programme. Harry Ricketts was born in London. He has published eight collections of poems (most recently Your Secret Life), an acclaimed biography of Kipling, The Unforgiving Minute (1999), and the extended personal essays How To Live Elsewhere (Montana Four Winds Press, 2004) and How To Catch A Cricket Match (Awa Press, 2006). He is currently editing an anthology of NZ Sports writing and finishing a collective biography of a dozen WW1 poets, entitled Strange Meetings. He co-edits the review journal New Zealand Books and lives in Wellington where he teaches English Literature and creative non-fiction at Victoria University.