Introducing Diana Menefy

Diana Menefy            

Diana was born in Christchurch. Growing up in the South Island gave her a rich collection of experiences and images: the snow on the mountains, the autumn colours, the north-west winds - having to push her bike home as the payoff for an express ride to school.

In 1974 Diana and her husband bought the dairy farm in Tapuhi, Northland. Life on the farm with a river that flooded and three adventurous children was a great background for a budding writer.  Her first stories and articles were published in the New Zealand Farmer and School Journal in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

 For the next ten years most of her published work was non-fiction although she had several short stories in anthologies. She worked as a part-time feature writer for the local paper, then went freelance to work on commissioned histories. Running parallel with this was a passion for children's literature that culminated as the specialty for her master's degree in education in 2001.

2001 saw her first junior novel River Crossing and her sixth commissioned non-fiction book The Centenary of Whangarei Hospital  published. Learning Media accepted four of her readers for the American market and sales of Pounamu New Zealand Jade, a book aimed at the tourist market, were reaching towards 12,000. This was also the year Diana started to work for NorthTec tutoring and doing the course design for the online diplomas of applied writing. She is now a principal academic staff member at Northtec.

In 2010 Shadow of the Boyd was published by HarperCollins and went on to be shortlisted in the N.Z. Post Children’s Book Awards and won the LIANZA Esther Glen Medal in 2011. In 2013 Diana was asked to write one of the Kiwis at War series for Scholastic.  1915: Wounds of War was published in 2015.

1915: Wounds of War
Teaching notes: http://www.scholastic.co.nz/Club/pdfs/1915_wounds_of_war.pdf
ISBN: 9781775432746
RRP $19.00