Ingrid Horrocks is an essayist, travel writer and fiction writer. She was born in Hamilton, grew up on farms around Auckland and the Wairarapa, and has lived in the UK, Germany, and the US, where she completed a PhD in literature at Princeton. Ingrid is the author of numerous books, spanning multiple genres, and her writing has appeared in Lithub, The Ninth Letter, The Sydney Review of Books, Spinoff, Landfall, and the Guardian. Her fiction debut, All Her Lives: Nine Stories, is forthcoming with Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2025, and University of Queensland Press in 2026.

Ingrid’s latest nonfiction book, Where We Swim (VUP and UQP, 2021), published simultaneously in Aotearoa and Australia, is a blend of essay, memoir, travel, and nature writing. Described as an “exquisitely written” (The Australian), “luminous” “work of wondrous depth” (Australian Book Review), it is “several books in one: a travel book, …a family narrative, and … a book about climate change”: “A book of our moment” (Harry Ricketts, RNZ). Ranging from Wellington beaches and rivers, to the Amazon and the Arizona desert, it explores the interconnectedness of lives: mundane and extraordinary, local and global, human and nonhuman. Working to unmake assumptions about both nature and travel writing, the book seeks forms adequate to our contemporary experiences in a time of ecological and political crisis. It is also a book about mid-life and family.

Ingrid’s other writing includes a poetry book and the genre-bending Travelling with Augusta: 1835 and 1999 (VUP 2003). She has also written a book on the history of women wanderers, Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and co-edited a collection with Cherie Lacey, Extraordinary Anywhere: Essays on Place from Aotearoa New Zealand (VUP, 2016).

Ingrid is an Honorary Research Fellow at Massey University, where she was formerly a Professor of Creative Writing. With Tina Makereti, she co-chaired the steering committee for the international festival for nonfiction writing, NonfictioNOW2021. In 2024, she was the Kaituhi Tarāwhare, Creative New Zealand Writer in Residence at the International Institute of Modern Letters. She was awarded a Michael King Established Writer Residency (2021), a Massey University Excellence Fund Major Grant (2019), NZ Vice-Chancellor’s Committee, William Georgetti Award (1999) and in 1996 both the Victoria University Prize for Original Composition ENGL 252 and University of Canterbury Macmillan Brown Prize for Writers.

Ingrid’s new work, All Her Lives (Te Herenga Waka Press, October 2025) is a short story collection that follows women across generations as they resist, nurture and transform. These are lives shaped by love and politics, motherhood and memory, constraint and defiance.

Ingrid lives in Te Whanganui a Tara, Wellington, with her partner and twin daughters.

 

Links

Ingrid’s website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Te Herenga Waka University Press writer page

IIML and CNZ Writer-in-residence announcement (Nov, 2023)

Lithub essay ‘Dissolving Genre: Toward Finding New Ways to Write About the World’ subsequently published in Bloomsbury collection, Bending Genre (Jan, 2022)

Guardian essay ‘In a New Zealand estuary, I closed my eyes and floated. It turned out the water was toxic’ (July, 2021)

Spinoff essay ‘The climate crisis is seeping into books and making them really, really weird’ (March, 2021)