Closing the Gaps was a policy of the Fifth Labour Government of New Zealand for assisting socio-economically disadvantaged Māori and Pasifika ethnic groups in New Zealand through specially targeted social programmes. The phrase "Closing the Gaps" was a slogan of the Labour Party in the 1999 election campaign and was implemented as a policy initiative in the 2000 Budget.
Lydia Joyce Wevers was a New Zealand literary historian, literary critic, editor, and book reviewer. She was an academic at Victoria University of Wellington for many years, including acting as director of the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies from 2001 to 2017. Her academic research focussed on New Zealand literature and print culture, as well as Australian literature. She wrote three books, Country of Writing: Travel Writing About New Zealand 1809–1900 (2002), On Reading (2004) and Reading on the Farm: Victorian Fiction and the Colonial World (2010), and edited a number of anthologies.
Anne Kennedy is a New Zealand novelist, poet, and filmwriter.
Sir Vincent Gerard O'Sullivan was a New Zealand poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright, critic, editor, biographer, librettist, and academic. From 1988 to 2004 he was a professor of English literature at Victoria University of Wellington, and in 2013 he was appointed the New Zealand Poet Laureate.
Damien Wilkins is a New Zealand novelist, short story writer, and poet. He is the director of the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington.
Margaret Shirley Mutu is a Ngāti Kahu leader, author and academic from Karikari, New Zealand and works at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is Māori and her iwi (tribes) are Ngāti Kahu, Te Rarawa and Ngāti Whātua.
Chris Tse is a New Zealand poet, short story writer and editor. His works explore questions of identity, including his Chinese heritage and queer identity. His first full-length poetry collection, How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes, won the Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards in 2016. In 2022, he was appointed as the New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2022 to 2024. In February 2024, his term was extended by another year.
Anna Mackenzie is a New Zealand writer of contemporary, historic and speculative fiction for adult and young adult audiences. She has won numerous awards for her writing and also works as an editor, mentor, teacher of creative writing programmes and public speaker at festivals and in schools.
Anne Else is a New Zealand writer, researcher and editor.
Tracey Slaughter is a New Zealand writer and poet.
Ingrid Horrocks is a creative writing teacher, poet, travel writer, editor and essayist. She lives in Wellington, New Zealand.
Janis Freegard is a poet and fiction writer. Her work has been widely published in books, anthologies and literary magazines. She lives in Wellington, New Zealand.
Susan Diana Price is a New Zealand writer, historian, researcher, philanthropist and expert on and collector of children’s books. She lives in Wellington.
Gordon William McLauchlan was a New Zealand writer and social historian. He became a popular media personality through his work on both television and radio.
Helen Elizabeth Beaglehole is a New Zealand writer, editor and historian. She is known for her children's books including Two Tigers (1993) and War Zones (2005), and for her historical books about New Zealand's lighthouses and rural fire-fighting.
Michalia Arathimos is a Greek–New Zealand writer. She has held several writers' residencies in New Zealand, and received several awards for her short stories. Her debut novel, Aukati, was published in 2017.
Ann Beaglehole is a New Zealand writer and historian. In the 1950s, her family emigrated from Hungary to New Zealand as refugees following the Hungarian Revolution. She earned a PhD in history and a master's degree in creative writing from Victoria University of Wellington, and has written extensively on the history of immigration to New Zealand, including the history of Jewish immigrants and refugees. In addition to a number of non-fiction history works, she has also written a semi-autobiographical novel about the experiences of a Hungarian Jewish refugee in New Zealand.
Jessie Munro is a New Zealand writer, biographer and French teacher. She won the Book of the Year at the 1997 Montana New Zealand Book Awards for her biography of Suzanne Aubert.
Adrienne Marie Chilton was a New Zealand broadcaster, historian, musicologist and writer. Her works focused on biographies, cricket, music, popular culture and social commentary. She was a professor of general musicalship and musical history at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama for 18 years. Simpson regularly broadcast for the BBC and Radio New Zealand and was a research fellow at both the National Library of New Zealand and her first alma mater, the Victoria University of Wellington.
Ben Schrader was a New Zealand historian specialising in urban history. His areas of interest included the history of state housing in New Zealand and urban development in New Zealand in the 19th and 20th centuries.
