Laurence Fearnley is an award-winning novelist. Her novel The Hut Builder won the fiction category of the 2011 NZ Post Book Awards and was shortlisted for the international 2010 Boardman Tasker Prize for mountain writing. Her 2014 novel, Reach, was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, Edwin and Matilda was runner-up in the 2008 Montana New Zealand Book Awards and her second novel, Room, was shortlisted for the 2001 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. In 2017 she was the joint winner of the Landfall essay competition and in 2016 she won the NZSA/Janet Frame Memorial Award. In 2004 Fearnley was awarded the Artists to Antarctica Fellowship and in 2007 the Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago. Laurence lives in Dunedin with her husband and son.