Juliette MacIver and Sarah Davis won the 2017 Picture Book Award at New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults for That's Not a Hippopotamus!
What was your greatest holiday?
In recent years we have taken to staying in a hut in the Orongorongo Valley. There is no electricity of course, or hot water, and we have to walk in for an hour and a half, carrying food for six. But it is sheltered and hidden and sunny and surrounded by native bush. It's wholly blissful.
And the worst?
I went with my father and my first child Louis, an 18-month-old tornado, to Akaroa on Banks Peninsula, a long-time family place. My husband Ken was finishing his final paramedic exams after years of working towards them. He flew down the next day to join us. That night, my father was sleeping in the bedroom above us, one storey up. Around midnight, there was an unidentifiable racket, like a huge wardrobe being hauled across the wooden floor above us. Then came an almighty crash, followed by awful groaning. Ken raced upstairs for his first job as a fully-qualified paramedic, in fully-useful pyjamas. He burst in the door to find the bedroom empty, the heavy bed dragged away from the window and the sash wide open. Dad had managed all this in his sleep, capping it off with what he later termed his Peter Pan act: leaping out the window. He lay concussed on the concrete path, with a broken pelvis. We spent the holiday visiting local doctors and driving back and forth to Christchurch hospital, all the while running around after Tornado Louis.
