CHRIS BAKER grew up in small towns all over the North Island. He worked in New Zealand and Australia as a journalist and editor and left the profession for fencing, bush and farm work, driving, construction work and concrete finishing. An environmental campaigner in the 1970s, in the 1980s he was a Labourer’s Union job delegate at the Marsden Point refinery expansion before moving to Brighton, south of Dunedin, where he now lives.

‘I’m currently confined to a wheelchair (multiple sclerosis) and am writing full-time. My ancestry is Polynesian (Samoan), Celtic and Anglo-Saxon. I regard myself as a Pacific person, and my thanks to Ngapuhi Nui Tonu and particularly Ngati Hau and Ngati Korora for taking me in and allowing me to feel like I belonged somewhere.’