Bob Orr was born in 1949 in the Waikato. Most of his adult life has been spent in Auckland, where he worked as a seafarer plying the waters of the Waitematā Harbour and Hauraki Gulf. He now lives in Kohukohu, a village on the shores of the Hokianga Harbour. Bob has published eleven previous books. In 2016 he was awarded the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for Poetry and in 2017 he was the Writer in Residence at the University of Waikato. The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature comments on his 'tautly controlled imagistic lyrics, some of intense verbal beauty and force of feeling.’