Tessa Duder was born and educated in Auckland and as a teenager won a silver medal in butterfly at the 1958 Cardiff Empire Games. She worked as a journalist in Auckland and London before marrying and raising four daughters in London, Pakistan and New Zealand. Tessa began writing fiction when she was 38. Her novels for young readers, published in New Zealand, America, Britain, Australia, Canada and in five languages, include Night Race to Kawau, Jellybean, the Alex Quartet, Mercury Beach, Hot Mail (with William Taylor), the Tiggie Tompson trilogy, and most recently The Sparrow. In 1993 Alex was adapted as a full-length movie, and in 2023 all four books were reissued in one volume as the Alex Quartet.

Non-fiction publications include First Map: How James Cook Charted Aotearoa New Zealand, and biographies of Margaret Mahy, Sir Peter Blake and Auckland pioneer Sarah Matthew. Other literary activities since the 1990s have included teaching, visiting schools and judging.

She served for twenty years as a Trustee of the Storylines Children’s Literature Trust Te Whare Waituhi Tamariki o Aotearoa, and remains a member of the Friends of Storylines Ngā Pou o te Whare Waituhi Tamariki o Aotearoa Management Committee. In 2010 Storylines established the Storylines Tessa Duder Award in her name, in honour of the place Tessa holds in the establishment of the young adult genre in the New Zealand literary landscape. The award, in association with publisher Allen & Unwin, is given biennially for a young adult novel manuscript. She is a former Trustee and now Vice-patron of the Spirit of Adventure Trust.

Among her awards are three New Zealand Children’s Book of the Year awards and three Esther Glen medals, and in 2005 received the Storylines Gaelyn Gordon Award for Night Race to Kawau. She held the Waikato University Writer’s Fellowship in 1991; was awarded the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship to Menton, France, in 2003; and in 2007 travelled to Antarctica on an Artists to Antarctica fellowship. In 1990 she was awarded a New Zealand Commemorative Medal in 1990, the OBE in 1994, and the Storylines Margaret Mahy Medal in 1996. In 2008 she received an Honorary Doctorate for services to youth by the University of Waikato. In 2020 she received the CNZM for services to literature and youth and the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement (Fiction), and was the 2021 New Zealand Society of Authors’ President of Honour.

Among her leisure interests are music, reading and sailing. She lives in Auckland, and has two grandchildren.