Nine Girls

Stacy Gregg (Ngāti Mahuta/Ngāti Pukeko/Ngāti Maru) grew up in Ngāruawāhia, the small but culturally significant town where Nine Girls is set. Her essay about Ngāruawāhia, The Māoris From The Town Side of the River won the Voyager national journalism award in 2023.
Nine Girls explores similar themes to her essay in a novel for middle-grade readers, set in the tumultuous period of social upheaval in New Zealand in the late seventies and early eighties. The book is Stacy's first novel with Penguin Random House UK/NZ. Stacy has previously published 32 middle-grade fiction novels with HarperCollins UK and remains HarperCollins NZ’s third best-selling children’s author of all-time after David Walliams and Dr Seuss. Her Pony Club Secrets series (totalling 13 books) sold over 1.5 million copies globally in English alone and later became the CBBC TV series Mystic which ran for three seasons.
Stacy's second series Pony Club Rivals continued to define and dominate pony genre fiction before she moved into stand-alone hardbacks. Her first standalone in 2013, The Princess and the Foal, was based on the true life story of Princess Haya of Jordan and written with the blessing of HRH. Stacy travelled to the royal palaces and stables of Jordan for research and since then has travelled extensively to research all her standalone titles, including journeys to Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Russia and Iceland.
Eight times a finalist in the NZ Children's book awards, a consecutive three-time winner of the NZ Book Awards Children’s Choice Award, Stacy is also the two-time winner of TV's WhatNow Children’s Choice Award for middle-grade fiction.
Stacy's other titles for younger readers include junior fiction series, Spellbound Ponies, the picture books In or Out and The Easter Bunny Hunt for HCUK, and the popular Mini Whinny series for Scholastic. Her screen writing credits include Mystic and the current Acorn TV series, My Life Is Murder, starring Xena Warrior Princess' Lucy Lawless.