A very popular visitor to schools, Juliette brings energy, humour and boundless enthusiasm to her presentations, artfully weaving in lessons on story structure and useful ideas for sparking and developing stories. She has also done many workshops with children, focusing on elements of story in general, or sometimes specialising in the art of rhythm and rhyme. She has honed these skills through visiting schools all over Aotearoa New Zealand over the past 11 years, and since 2015 has also come to Australia for two weeks in August every year (pre-Covid). Her love of children is evident in her ability to connect with her young audience, encouraging their creativity and their faith in themselves as people with ideas and something to say.

Juliette is the author of 20 much-loved picture books. She also has three junior fiction books scheduled for publication with Scholastic this year. In 2017 she won the Picture Book category at the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults, and was shortlisted on three other occasions. Other awards include: the Storylines Notable Book Award, which she has received five times, the Joy Cowley Award for which she has been shortlisted four times, and one nomination for the Australian Crystal Kite Award. In the United States, That’s Not a Hippopotamus! made the shortlist for the Florida Reading Association Awards. 

Her books are available variously in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the UK, theUSA, and China, where she has had five titles translated into Mandarin. That’s Not a Hippopotamus! has also been translated into Te Reo Māori, as Te Hipo Huna.

She has a Bachelor’s degree in linguisitics, a Postgraduate diploma in teaching English as a second language, and is part-way through a Master’s degree, also in linguistics. She lives in a seaside suburb with her husband Ken and their four children, where she does lots of yoga, kitchen-dancing and solving of Rubik’s cubes. 

LATEST NEWS:

The Grizzled Grist  Does Not Exist!  has won Global Picture Book of the Year 2022, presented by Funky Kids Radio as part of their Global Children's Entertainment Awards.