Karyn Hay is an award-winning author and broadcaster. She grew up in the Thames Valley dairy factory town of Waitoa, near Te Aroha. She began her working life as a Radio New Zealand cadet and has been an award-winning copywriter, a radio announcer both here and abroad, a television front person, a newspaper columnist, a producer and director, and general manager of radio station Kiwi FM.

Karyn’s award-winning debut novel Emerald Budgies was released in 2000 while she was living aboard a boat in England. The March of The Foxgloves was published in 2016 and was a bestseller on the New Zealand Fiction list, and her latest novel Winged Helmet, White Horse was published in 2018 to critical acclaim.

In the 2020 New Year Honours, Karyn was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to broadcasting and the music industry. She was awarded a Taite Music Prize, the Independent Spirit Award, in 2022 for her TV and radio work since the 1980s.