Cristina Sanders is an historical fiction writer from Wellington, now living in Hawke's Bay. She began her career in the book trade in her parents' children's bookshop and spent some years with Collins Publishers in NZ, Hodder & Stoughton in London and back home to Booksellers New Zealand. This was followed by three children and a business career. In 2018 she completed the Graduate Diploma in Creative Writing at Whitireia. She works with a forest regeneration project, and spends her downtime up the mast of the Spirit of New Zealand. In 2020 she won the Storylines Tessa Duder award for an unpublished YA manuscript, with a novel about an immigrant family in the 1870s. Her debut novel, Jerningham, about the recklessness of colonial New Zealand, will be published in June 2020.