Lauren Keenan (Te Ātiawa ki Taranaki) is a writer of junior novels, short stories and popular psychology with a Master of Arts in New Zealand history. Lauren was a winner at the 2017 Pikihuia Awards for Māori writers and a finalist in the 2019 awards. She was also a participant in Te Papa Tupu mentoring programme. Her short stories have appeared in Huia Short Stories collections in 2015, 2017 and 2019, and in 2020 her book The 52 Week Project was published. In 2022, Lauren’s breakout junior fiction novel Amorangi and Millie’s Trip Through Time was published and became an immediate success as a core text for the Aotearoa New Zealand histories curriculum. It was a finalist in the NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults 2022, longlisted in the ARA Historical Novel Prize 2022 and won the NZ Booklovers Award for Best Junior Fiction Book 2023. In 2024, her historical novel The Space Between was published, as well as Rimu: Tree of Time which is the second book in Lauren’s Amorangi and Millie adventure series.
