Sir Paul Callaghan was born in Wanganui in August 1947 and died in Wellington in March 2012. He received international recognition for his scientific research in the field of nuclear magnetic resonance. In 2001 he became the thirty-sixth New Zealander to be made a Fellow of the Royal Society. Maurice Gee is widely regarded as one of New Zealand's greatest authors, for both adults and children. He has received numerous awards, nominations and grants for his adult fiction, including the Wattie Award and the Montana Award, and also for his young adult and children's books. In 2004 he received a Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement. His adult novels include the Plumb trilogy, Going West, Prowlers, Live Bodies and Blindsight. Kathleen Jones's published work includes radio journalism, articles for magazines and newspapers, short fiction and 10 books, a mixture of biography, general non-fiction and poetry. They include biographies of the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti, Catherine Cookson, and Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, along with A Passionate Sisterhood, an account of the lives of women who lived with 'the lake poets'. She divides her time between England, Italy and New Zealand. 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.