Gareth Ward (author)
magician, hypnotist, storyteller, bookseller and author in New Zealand
Gareth Ward is a New Zealand bookseller, novelist, magician and hypnotist.
Ward was born in Banbury, England. He attended the University of York where he gained a joint honours degree in biology and computer science. He was a British Royal Marine commando before becoming a police officer.
Ward's steampunk first novel, The Traitor and the Thief, won the 2016 Storylines Tessa Duder Award, the 2018 Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Youth Novel, a 2018 Storylines Notable Book Award.
Ward and his wife Louise Ward, also a former UK police officer, own two Wardini Books stores in Hawke’s Bay, in Hastings and Napier. They won the Nielsen Bookshop of the Year 2020 in the Book Trade Industry Awards.
In 2023 they began writing a series of cosy murder mystery novels. In 2024, their first novel The Bookshop Detectives: Dead Girl Gone was the largest selling New Zealand novel. The novel won the Booksellers Choice Adult Award in 2025.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Gareth Ward (author)” as magician, hypnotist, storyteller, bookseller and author in New Zealand. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as magician, hypnotist, storyteller, bookseller and author in New Zealand. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q106734255. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2023.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gareth Ward (author)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.