![James McNeish](http://d2wzqffx6hjwip.cloudfront.net/text-publishing/assets/39/2a34201e5811e4ad73d1fe4c48c09f/3b3a28601e5811e48a5383cccd976e47_author.jpg)
James McNeish was a novelist, playwright and biographer. He was born in Auckland in 1931 and travelled the world as a young man, working as a deckhand on a Norwegian freighter, in the theatre in London and as a journalist for the BBC, Guardian and Observer. He wrote more than twenty books and received a number of awards and fellowships.
In 2010 James was made a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit and received the NZ Prime Minister’s Award for literary achievement in non-fiction.