Margaret Mahy ONZ (21 March 1936 – 23 July 2012) was a New Zealand author of children's and young adult books.

Many of her story plots have strong supernatural elements but her writing concentrates on the themes of human relationships and growing up.

At her death she was one of thirty writers to win the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Medal for her "lasting contribution to children's literature".

[5][a] Among her children's books, A Lion in the Meadow and The Seven Chinese Brothers and The Man Whose Mother was a Pirate are considered national classics.

[6] Her novels have been translated into Te Reo Māori, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Italian, Japanese, Catalan and Afrikaans.

[15] From around 1965, Mahy lived at Governors Bay on the Banks Peninsula, Canterbury, in the South Island of New Zealand.

[19] Mahy died at the Nurse Maude Hospice in St Albans, Christchurch on 23 July 2012, aged 76.

[9][15][16][20][21][22][23] She had been diagnosed with an inoperable cancerous jaw tumour in April 2012 and had been moved to a hospice about nine days before her death.

[22] Her final book Tale of a Tail, published posthumously in 2014, was commissioned by Polish photographer Tomasz Gudzowaty.

In March 2009 she was commemorated as one of the Twelve Local Heroes and a bronze bust of her was unveiled outside the Christchurch Arts Centre.

Directed by Yvonne Mackay and produced by The Production Shed.TV, the series includes a cameo appearance by Margaret Mahy in a library scene.

Her oeuvre provides a vast, numinous, but intensely personal metaphorical arena for the expression and experience of childhood and adolescence.

It is named for the mythical bird phoenix, which is reborn from its ashes, to suggest the book's rise from obscurity.