IF YOU'RE VISITING this corner of my website, I guess it's because you want to know a bit about me. So, here goes!

First of all, I was born. That was quite a few years ago now, in the city of Auckland, New Zealand. Right down at the very bottom of the world—almost.

Back then we had a huge backyard, and it was my dad’s job to mow it—although he didn’t like doing it. Not one little bit. So, one day he took a drive into the countryside, gave a farmer some money, and brought home four sheep in the back of his pickup truck.

As it turned out, they weren’t the kind of sheep that were happy to just hang around, chewing the grass, growing fluffy coats and bleating at each other. They were high jumpers!

I was usually the first through the door in the afternoons, and often I’d arrive home from school to find they’d leaped over a fence and were trampling the neighbors’ garden. This didn’t make us particularly popular with the people next door.

One day I arrived home to find the sheep had done a runner—scrammed, vamoosed, skedaddled… vanished without a trace.

We kept an ear out for reports of a bunch of woolly escape artists taking over the neighborhood, but there was nothing. They’d just disappeared into thin air… or maybe into someone’s pot?

After that, Dad gave up on his dream of becoming a suburban farmer and reintroduced himself to his lawnmower. It wasn’t the end of the animals, though. Soon after, we got some ducks. Unfortunately, they too quickly figured out how to break through the fence and help themselves to the neighbors’ vegetable patch.

Sheep, ducks, cats, a canary, a rabbit, a pet mouse... an older brother. When I think about it, my childhood was full of animals.

One of my early memories is of proudly taking a story I’d written, about a hippopotamus, to show my teacher. Neat handwriting wasn’t my strong suit. Truth be told, it was my weak suit—and my teacher was so unimpressed, she stapled all the pages together without even reading my masterpiece.

I never took anything else to school to show that teacher, but I kept on writing. When I grew up, I became a journalist and wrote stories for newspapers and magazines about real people and real events that happened in the world. By then I could use a keyboard, so my messy writing wasn’t a problem.

​These days, I live by the beach in Auckland with my partner—not far from those tunnels that Tom and Stevie like exploring in The Mummy in the Attic.