A very popular visitor to schools, Juliette MacIver brings energy, humour and boundless enthusiasm to her presentations, artfully weaving in lessons on story structure and useful ideas for sparking and developing stories. She has also done many workshops with children, focusing on elements of story in general, or specialising in the art of rhythm and rhyme. She has honed these skills through visiting schools all over New Zealand over the past 11 years, and in Sydney for two weeks in August every year (pre-Covid) as part of Australia Book Week celebrations. Her love of children comes through in her ability to connect with her audience, encouraging their creativity and their faith in themselves as people with ideas and something to say.
Juliette is the author of 19 much-loved picture books. She has won Best Picture Book at the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults, and has made the shortlist on three other occasions (see below). Other awards include the Storylines Notable Book Award, which she has received five times, the Storylines Joy Cowley Award for which she has been shortlisted four times, and one nomination for the Australian Crystal Kite Award. In the United States, That’s Not a Hippopotamus! made the shortlist for the Florida Reading Association Awards.
Her books are available in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the UK, the USA, and China, where she has had five titles translated into Mandarin. That’s Not a Hippopotamus! has also been translated into te reo Māori, as Te Hipo Huna.
Juliette  has a BA in Linguistics,  and Diploma in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from Tirnity College of London, and is part-way through a Master’s degree, also in linguistics. She lives in a seaside suburb with her husband Ken and their four children, where she does lots of yoga, kitchen-dancing and solving of Rubik’s cubes.