Bernadette Hall is a poet and a playwright and the author of Heartwood, Of Elephants, The Persistent Levitator, and Still Talking. Her play Glad and the Angels won the Aoraki Festival playwriting award. She was the 1996 Burns Fellow at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand; the 2006 Victoria University Writer in Residence; and held the 2007 Rathcoola Residency in Donoughmore, Ireland. She is a founding staff member of the Hagley Writers' Institute in Christchurch.