Jane Higgins

ane was born in Christchurch, New Zealand. Over the years, she has traveled away, but she returned in the 1990s; she and her husband, Paul, live there still, even though the ground now shakes at regular and unnerving intervals and has done since the earthquakes of September 2010 and February 2011.


Growing up, she read a lot of classic science fiction, fantasy and myth, and was captivated by the astonishing beauty and strangeness of the universe and by the writers who explored it – in fiction and non-fiction. She tried some exploring of her own, in the company of the very cool people in the Canterbury Astronomical Society – people who made their own telescopes and tracked the patterns of the solar system from their own backyards. She watched Dr. Who (almost, but not quite, from the beginning), Star Trek (favourite episode: The Trouble with Tribbles – great, because so silly) and The Prisoner (great, because so weird), and kept reading. She went to university and completed a degree in astronomy and mathematics and thought about spending her life sitting on a mountain being an astronomer.


A trip away to Europe, post-degree, derailed those ambitions. Seeing serious poverty and serious preparations for war for the first time was a powerful experience. She came home to study social science and learn from some amazing people about its concrete expression in the world through campaigns against poverty, oppressive labour laws and racism in New Zealand and elsewhere.


She became an academic at the University of Canterbury then at Lincoln University, specializing in research with young people about their lives (for more on that see this). She wrote a lot of non-fiction for academic journals, kept reading and finally had a go at writing a novel.


She was lucky to be part of the inaugural intake of the Hagley Writers’ Institute – more wonderful people, including tutors and fellow scribblers. In their company, The Bridge grew from a short story into something longer and more complicated.


She still works as a researcher with young people, still reads, still writes (and still watches Dr. Who). She is currently working on a sequel to The Bridge. It's called Havoc, and will be published by Text in 2015.