Who is Mandy Hager?Mandy Hager is best known as a writer for young adults, though her published work also includes novels for adults, non-fiction resources for youth, scripts and short stories. She has won numerous awards, with her first book Tom's Story (1995) recieving an Honour Award in the 1996 Aim Children's Book Awards, and her novels The Nature of Ash and Dear Vincent both awarded the LIANZA Young Adult Fiction Award in consecutive years. For Singing Home the Whale (2014), Hager was awarded the prestigious Margaret Mahy Book of the Year Award in the 2015 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. In 2014 she was the recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship.