Born in Whanganui and raised on farms around the North Island, Bren MacDibble incorporates her love of the land into her environmentally themed children’s books. Bren did the big OE in her mid 20s and moved to Melbourne for the next twenty years. A house fire prompted her to move on and she lived in a bus travelling around Australia for a couple of years before settling on the coral coast of Western Australia.
Bren’s first two novels, How to Bee, for children, and In the Dark Spaces, for young adults under the name Cally Black, both picked up CYA New Zealand Book Awards in 2018. Her third novel, The Dog Runner, for children, won a CYA New Zealand Book Award in 2019. Across the Risen Sea set in a future drowned world was published in 2020 and The Raven’s Song, dealing with deep time written with Zana Fraillon comes out in October 2022.
Bren hopes that her books dealing with changed futures give opportunities for people to talk about the kind of future they want. She hopes the stories give children a safe context for discussion of complex issues and they feel empowered seeing young characters coping with change.