Gregory O’Brien has been announced as the winner of the 2012 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction in New Zealand. His recent writing includes Euan Macleod: The Painter in the Painting (Euan Macleod is a New Zealand born artist based in Sydney), and he was a central character in Kermadec: Nine Artists Explore the South Pacific where he acted as a co-ordinator, artist, editor and writer for an amazing artists’ journey and accompanying book about a remote and rarely visited region at the heart of one of the world’s great ocean wilderness areas. The vast Kermadec region, between New Zealand and Tonga, is home to whales, turtles, sharks, seabirds, deep-sea marine life, underwater volcanoes and a deep-sea trench, making the Kermadec Islands a hotspot for some of the most geologically active and biologically unusual features on the planet. At the heart of this project is the artists’ desire to articulate the issues that face the Kermadecs and the urgent need to safeguard the Earth’s marine environment.