Barbara Else is the author of three novels: six for adults and seven for children. Her work is distinctive for its strands of subversive humour. She has also written short stories and plays for adults and children and has edited eight children’s anthologies. In addition, she is a literary agent, editor, fiction consultant and playwright. Barbara has been awarded an MNZM for Services to Literature (2005), and Margaret Mahy Medal for lifetime achievement and services to children’s literature (2016). In 2025 Barbara received the CNZ Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement for fiction.

Her best-selling first novel The Warrior Queen was described by Quote Unquote as ‘the accessible feminism.’ Four more contemporary novels followed, then an historical novel Wild Latitudes. Books in her children’s quartet Tales of Fontania have won several awards including the Esther Glen Medal, the prestigious IBBY and White Raven Awards, Honour Awards in the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults, and Storylines Notable Books Awards. Her non-fiction work for children, Go Girl – a storybook of epic NZ women (Penguin 2018), broke local sales records and was a finalist for the NZ Post Children’s Book Awards 2019. In 2024 Barbara’s memoir Laughing at the Dark (Penguin, 2023), a funny, moving book about how she rebelled against being a ‘good girl’, was shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Award for General Non-Fiction.

Barbara has an MA Hons in English Literature and Literary Criticism. She has twice been a judge of the NZ Post Children’s and Young Adult Book Awards, the second time in 2014 as Chief Judge. She is co-director of a small NZ literary agency and manuscript assessment service, and with husband and author Chris Else, was instrumental in setting up both the New Zealand Association of Literary Agents and the New Zealand Association of Manuscript Assessors. She was the Victoria University of Wellington Writer in Residence (1999), and CNZ/Otago University Children’s Writer in Residence (2016).

Her most recent work The Pets We Have Killed (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2024), marks Barbara’s return to fiction for adults. The stories in this collection are notable for their range in genre and tone, from realism to science fiction and fantasy, from subversive humour and sharp satire to thoughtful and humane contemplation of the human condition. Many are about romantic relationships – fresh and new, would-be, or long gone. With Barbara’s trademark wit, all demonstrate how the problems women face change little as time passes …

 

Links

Barbara Else’s website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Random House Books author page

CNZ Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement announcement (Nov, 2025)

ANZRB review of Pets We Have Killed (Dec, 2024)

Otago Daily Times article on Go Girl (2018)

Barbara’s Storylines Margaret Mahy Medal lecture (2016)

Otago Bulletin article on the University Fellows’ Event at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery (2016)

Otago Bulletin article in which Barbara discusses Dunedin and her writing (2016)

Quote Unquote reprinted review of Warrior Queen by Mark Amery (2013)

Quote Unquote reprinted review of Warrior Queen by Shirley Maddock (2013)