Rebecca Macfie is an experienced journalist who joined the New Zealand Listener in 2007 as the magazine's South Island writer. Since starting out in journalism in 1988 she has written for the Christchurch Star, The Press, National Business Review, Independent Business Weekly, North & South, Unlimited magazine and the New Zealand Herald. She is a recent winner of the Bruce Jesson Journalism Prize in support of a book she is writing on the Pike River mining disaster. She lives in Christchurch, where she says the strange and broken has become normal. She and her husband have a 21-year-old son and a 19-year-old daughter.