Jack Lasenby

[3] From 1950 to 1952, he studied at Auckland University College, where he first met Margaret Mahy, who was also to become a notable New Zealand children's writer.

[4] As well as being (at various times) a postman, waterfront worker, gardener, fisherman and labourer, Lasenby spent about 10 years as a deer-culler and possum-trapper in Te Urewera[5] where he sometimes said he got his education in the telling of tall tales around the camp fire.

They include memorable and often hilarious characters such as Harry Wakatipu the talking horse, Aunt Effie and Uncle Trev, and range from tall tales and yarns to science fiction, dystopia and books set in the bush or in his own Depression-era childhood in small-town New Zealand.

With Sam Hunt and Ian Riggir they published poems on an 1886 upright press obtained from the Government Printing Office.

The Battle of Pook Island won the junior fiction category of the 1997 New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards.

[13] Aunt Effie and the Island that Sank won the junior fiction section of the 2005 New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards.