Stevan Eldred-Grigg is an award-winning writer, author of some of the best-selling works of New Zealand history and of leading New Zealand novels. His works of fiction and non-fiction explore the West Coast, Canterbury, the wider South Island and the whole of New Zealand. He also writes about Samoa, Shanghai, Mexico and Australia. As a gay writer, a democratic writer, a comic writer, a satirical writer and a writer of tragedy, he takes on many topics. He is an observer and critic of inequality. Often he probes inequality by using the lens of social class. Or he does the probing by asking questions about gender and race relations. He has looked at race, gender and class in many contexts. Workplace is one sort of context: he has written about people trying to find the meaning of their lives while working in department stores and factories, on sheep stations and goldfields, in military barracks and on battlefields, and above all in kitchens in the suburbs. He looks at the rich and the poor. He is as much an expert on the working class of Aotearoa as he is on the colonial gentry. Another context for many of his books is the body. Kiwi sex life plays a lively role in several of his novels and history books, as do drink and drugs. Although he is himself Pakeha, known to his readers as someone who looks closely at Pakeha society and Pakeha culture, he has also written about links and breaks between Maori and Pakeha as well as the lives of the New Zealand Chinese, and about the relationship between 'White New Zealand' and the peoples of the Pacific, above all the people of Samoa and the Cook Islands.