I would very much like to acknowledge my gratitude for the award of the 2012 University of Otago College of Education/Creative New Zealand Children’s Writer in Residence, which provided me with six months’ writing time, accommodation at the charming Robert Lord Cottage and a comfortable office at the College of Education.
This fellowship enabled me to write The Pirates and the Nightmaker and it was made all the more special by the warmth of my welcome (and subsequent stay in Dunedin) by Trish Brooking and my colleagues at the college, and by my Longacre editor at Random House, Barbara Larson, and by many friends new and old of the writing community of Dunedin.
I would also like to thank Diane Hebley and Geoffrey Miles, both of whom, in their reviews of The Loblolly Boy and The Loblolly Boy and the Sorcerer respectively in New Zealand Books, suggested that a book explaining how the Loblolly Boy derived from the eighteenth-century term for a ship’s surgeon would be a Good Idea. This is that book.