Maxine Alterio, a writer and former academic from New Zealand, has also taught at various universities in the UK. Steele Roberts NZ published Maxine’s first collection, Live News and Other Stories, in 2005. Several of these stories won or were placed in national and international competitions. Others were broadcast on NZ National Radio and anthologised in short fiction collections. Penguin NZ published Maxine’s best-selling novels, Ribbons of Grace (2007) and Lives We Leave Behind (2012), with Penguin Random House NZ & AUS releasing her third novel, The Gulf Between (2019). Maxine has a PhD in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington, where she studied the memoirs of First World War nurses. She also co-authored Learning through Storytelling in Higher Education: Using Reflection and Experience to Improve Learning, published by Kogan Page UK and RoutledgeFalmer USA (2003). Winner of the 2013 Seresin Landfall/Otago University Press Writing Residency and joint recipient of the 2019 Dan Davin Literary Foundation Fellowship, Maxine is currently working on a fourth novel set in Ontario, Canada, and a second collection titled Stories Bodies Tell.