About Belinda

Belinda Mellor, born in England, long-time resident of Ireland (where her mother’s family hailed from), currently lives near the beach in Tahunanui, at the Top of the South Island of New Zealand. After a decade of milking goats and collecting eggs on a lifestyle block, she now runs a motel with her husband, Peter, whom she originally met on a retreat when she was a teenager, and married twenty years later after they had caught up with each other again.

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At the age of five Belinda won a school award for ‘free expression’ and has not stopped writing since. She was an inaugural winner of an Ian St James literary award for her fantasy story Bronwen’s Dowry (published with the eleven other finalists in the Collins anthology At the Stroke of Twelve).

 

Since then she has been awarded a literary bursary and an award for a character-driven story, had numerous non-fiction and occasional fiction pieces published in magazines and local newspapers and a play for children performed by a theatre-in-education company. 

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Bronwen’s Dowry has been more recently republished in another prize anthology: All These Shiny Worlds and she has several other short stories in the 2022 New Zealand and Australian authors anthology: Down Under Fantasy Realms (which includes two short stories from the same world as her Silvana novels).

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A background in Theology and Applied Spirituality, a lifetime interest in myths, legends, folklore and fairytales, and a passion for wild places, ecology and the environment all inform her writing.