Emma Neale is a poet and prose writer, whose first novel Night Swimming was published in 1998, followed by her first collection of poetry Sleeve Notes in 1999. Her writing has been featured extensively in journals and anthologies, and in 2000 Neale won the Todd New Writers’ Bursary. Neale’s novel Little Moon (2001) was described by John McCrystal as, ‘flawlessly written, deploying a wealth of descriptive imagery’. Neale won first place in the 2008 Takahe Poetry Competition with her poem 'Well', and was the inaugural recipient of the NZSA Janet Frame Memorial Award for Literature in 2008. Emma Neale won the 2011 Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry and she was the 2012 Robert Burns Fellow at The University of Otago. She also held the 2014 Sir James Wallace Trust/University of Otago Pah Homestead residency. Her book Billy Bird (Penguin Random House 2016) has received excellent reviews and was shortlisted for the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Bio and photo courtesy of Read NZ.