Stevan Eldred-Grigg is a leading novelist and historian. His first novel, Oracles and Miracles, was a runaway bestseller. He is the author of many other books, fiction and non-fiction, among them Diggers, Hatters and Whores: The story of the New Zealand gold rushes (2008), and White Ghosts, Yellow Peril: China and New Zealand, 1790–1950 (2014). Two earlier books focused on the world wars. Kaput! (2000) is a novel that tells the story of an ordinary German housewife and mother coping with Nazi dictatorship and Allied bombing. The Great Wrong War: New Zealand society in World War I (2010) polarised readers, with its author accused by some of betraying his country, while others congratulated him for setting the record straight. He now turns his uncompromising gaze on WWII.

Hugh Eldred-Grigg was born in Canterbury and graduated with an MA in political science from Victoria University of Wellington. Since graduating he has worked as a teaching assistant at VUW, a high school language teacher in Japan, a lecturer at Xiamen University in China, and a high school teacher in Estonia. Still in Estonia, at present he works in financial technology. He is the author of ‘What if the Moyle Affair had never happened?' in Stephen Levine (ed.), New Zealand as it Might Have Been (VUP, 2006).

"Stevan Eldred-Grigg defies classification. He can swoop from the historical to the contemporary, from lyric to polemic, from fiction to faction. He’s unsettling as well as absorbing." – David Hill, New Zealand Herald