Simon Pollard

Dr Simon Pollard was born and educated in Christchurch. He attended Mairehau High School and became interested in spiders as a third year zoology undergraduate at the University of Canterbury. He gained an MSc and PhD from the University of Canterbury and postdoctoral fellowships to the US, Canada and the UK. He is the Curator of Invertebrate Zoology at Canterbury Museum and Senior Fellow in Zoology at the University of Canterbury.

His photographs appear in books and magazines world-wide, including National Geographic, Time and Natural History. Simon once spent three weeks in a cave in Borneo with five million bats and many hand-sized spiders, as well as visiting a remote village in the north Philippines to unravel the details of unusual burial practises. Simon lectures on natural history and takes photography workshops worldwide, as well as working as a research and script consultant for natural history documentaries. He was a research consultant and script writer on Spiders from Mars, a documentary on the lives of jumping spiders, narrated by Sir David Attenborough. He has also spent three years extracting spider vomit from feeding spiders, is frequently a tarantula courier and was a tarantula wrangler on the BBC production, The Lost World, filmed in New Zealand.

Selected bibliography:

• I am a Spider (Reed 2001).
• I am an Insect (Reed 2003).
• Dear Allison: A New Zealand Soldier's Story from Stalag 383 by Dudley Muff, edited by Simon Pollard (Penguin 2009).

Awards:

• New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards 2010 Non-fiction finalist for Dear Allison.
• New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards 2010 Children's Choice Non-fiction Winner for Dear Allison.
• LIANZA Elsie Locke Award 2010 Winner for Dear Allison.