Aucklander Leonie Agnew joined the Storylines Management Committee in April 2016. She began writing as a child but it was winning the Storylines Tom Fitzgibbon Award in 2010, with her novel Super Finn, that provided the breakthrough. This book went on to multiple awards in the 2012 New Zealand Post awards: the Junior Fiction award, the Best First Book award and the Children’s Choice award. It was also a finalist for the LIANZA Esther Glen Medal that year.

Since then she has written five more novels and two picture books. These  include Conrad Cooper’s Last Stand (winner of the 2015 Esther Glen Medal) and The Memory Thief (winner of the 2022 junior fiction prize for the NZ Children’s and Young Adult Book Awards). In 2015 she was chosen as the winner of the Master of the Inkpot Competition run by prestigious UK children’s publisher David Fickling Books for her manuscript, The Impossible Boy. She won the Storylines Tessa Duder Award for The Impossible Story of Hannah Kemp in the same year. A former advertising copywriter, Leonie works as both writer and primary school teacher.