Mandy Hager is an award winning writer of fiction. She has published several books, poems, resources, scripts and novels, including The Crossing, the first book in the Blood of the Lamb trilogy, which won the Young Adult Fiction prize in the 2010 NZ Post Children’s Book Awards (and shortlisted for the LIANZA Book Awards and the Sir Julius Vogel Awards), Smashed, which won the 2008 Esther Glen Award, and a picture book, Tom's Story (Honour Award 1996 Aim Children’s Book Awards). Until recently she was employed as a writer for the Global Education Centre, an organisation that actively promotes 'change for a just world'. Two of her novels have been used as the basis of programmes for young people at risk, delivered by the Dare Foundation of New Zealand.

Mandy has an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University and an Advanced Diploma in Applied Arts (Writing) from Whitireia and is a trained teacher. She has a passion for writing ‘stories that matter’, and sees her role as novel writing lecturer as alternating between coach, mother, provocateur and cheerleader!