Alan Duff MBE (born 26 October 1950) is a New Zealand novelist and newspaper columnist.

After leaving school, Duff worked as an installer of sheet metal insulation and sang in a band.

One Night Out Stealing, appeared in 1991 and was shortlisted in the 1992 Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Awards.

Duff was awarded the Frank Sargeson Fellowship in 1991, and began writing a weekly—later bi-weekly – column for The Evening Post, syndicated to eight other newspapers.

[citation needed] State Ward started as a series of episodes on radio in 1993 and was published as a novella in 1994.

The Duffy Books in Homes scheme, co-founded in 1995 by Duff and Christine Fernyhough, with commercial sponsorship and government support, aims to alleviate poverty and illiteracy by providing low-cost books to underprivileged children, thus encouraging them to read.

(1996), the sequel to Once Were Warriors, was the winner of the fiction section of the 1997 Montana Book Awards and was also made into a film What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?

On 30 March 2008, he appeared in the Taupō District Court at a defended hearing and was represented by prominent barrister Antony Shaw.

[12] The charges were later dismissed by the Taupō District Court, Judge McGuire saying: "the result however, is that I am left uneasy over whether police prosecutorial power was used wisely and fairly in this instance...".

[14] In the 1995 New Year Honours, Duff was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire, for services to literature.