Jonathan Peet was born in New Zealand and has had a varied career including chef, fur trapper, farmer and estate agent. He is now retired in the beautiful Coromandel Peninsula on New Zealand's East Coast and enjoys fishing, scuba diving and playing guitar. Wairata is his first novel, stemming from his time in New Zealand's rugged hills, where small mining and mill-towns and settlements had flourished and died, along with their history, and this story was a culmination of that thought. He is currently working on his second novel. A story based around the first airmen of World War 1.