Tim Saunders farms sheep and beef near Palmerston North. He has written two adult non-fiction titles, This Farming Life and Under a Big Sky . He was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2021 for his story Carved ; the only New Zealander to be shortlisted for this prestigious prize that year. He has had poetry and short stories published in Headland, Best Small Fictions, takahe, Landfall, Poetry NZ Yearbook, Broadsheet, RNZ and Flash Frontier . He won the 2018 MindFood Magazine Short Story Competition. He was joint winner of the Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize in 2023. He performs poetry around the Manawatu and beyond. Carla Martell majored in graphic design, illustration and animation at Wellington Polytechnic's School of Design (now Massey) followed by post-graduate study in animation at Melbourne's Swinburne Institute of Technology.

She worked in the animation industry in Australia and the UK, and later completed a post-graduate Diploma in Multimedia Studies at Auckland University of Technology, specializing in moving image and multimedia production. In 2020 she illustrated her first children's book, Tulip & Doug (by Emma Wood, published by Scholastic NZ), and is currently working on her eleventh book. Her recent collaboration with author Juliette MacIver, Duck Goes Meow , won Best Picture Book in the 2023 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. Carla currently lives in Tamaki Makaurau Auckland with her family and two silly cats.