Tessa Duder would have to count as one of the top ten. Her most recent books have concerned a character called Tiggy Tompson... She is an established writer and a very good one. Kate de Goldi, who writes young adults’ books, is certainly one of the top ten writers ...Janice Marriott would be another top writer in New Zealand. She wrote a YA book called Crossroads which, to my shame, I have not read yet, but our city children's librarian says it is an underrated masterpiece, and other books of hers that I have read are highly entertaining and well written. William (Bill) Taylor has been writing for years, and I would definitively include him among the top ten. Joy Cowley has been an outstanding New Zealand writer over the years, contributing to two very successful educational reading series but also writing many trade books. Two of her very simple stories, Greedy Cat and Mrs Wishy-Washy, have been so popular that they have broken out of the Educational Publishing area and become trade books. She has written lively novels for middle school children and books like The Silent One which have worked well with older readers. Ken Catran was the winner of the New Zealand Post Children's Book of the Year for 2001. He began as a writer for TV, and in the beginning his books were jazzy but superficial. However he has developed enormously. He beat me in the New Zealand Post Book of the Year Award, and I beat him when it came to the Esther Glen Medal. We sent derisive messages to one another. Jack Lasenby is a writer for children and young adults I have admired for years, and over the last two or three years he has had the notice he deserves. His stories of a character called Uncle Trev are in the New Zealand tall-story tradition, but his recent novels beginning with Because we were the Travellers are science fiction and set in a post-apocalyptic NZ. Two other writers I would class among the top in New Zealand are David Hill and Diana Noonan. I suppose I would include myself in the top ten NZ authors. I won an award (the Esther Glen medal) in 2001 for 24 Hours, and I was short listed for the New Zealand Post Book Awards with the same title.

So far the writers I have mentioned are largely novelists... well, Joy has done the texts of picture books and so have I. However there are two author illustrators who deserve mention.
Pamela Allen has done many very successful children's picture books, illustrating her own texts... very simple texts but very effective and popular. Gavin Bishop has illustrated folktale texts, but has also written his own stories. And last year he did a version of The House That Jack Built giving it in its very intricate pictures the theme of local colonisation. It is a picture book but a picture book that is really intended for older readers - say eleven or twelve. One has not only to look at the main picture, but to think about the words that frame the picture - words in the Maori language, disintegrating as colonisation intrudes.