Kennedy Warne is an editor, writer, radio columnist and occasional poet and musician based in Aotearoa/New Zealand. He co-founded New Zealand Geographic magazine in 1988 out of a desire to celebrate the land, the wildlife and the people. He served as editor until 2004, when he switched from editing to writing feature stories for New Zealand Geographic and the magazine that was its inspiration, National Geographic. Since then, he has contributed more than 20 stories to National Geographic, mostly on marine subjects. The latest, on the coral reefs of the Philippines, was published in June 2022. He also writes and edits for an online Māori-Pasifika magazine, E-Tangata, and over the past dozen years has been an outdoors and adventure correspondent for New Zealand’s national radio station.

He has played the violin since childhood, and been a bluegrass and Irish fiddler for almost as long. He has written books about the world’s disappearing mangrove forests (Let Them Eat Shrimp) and about a Māori tribe (Tūhoe: Portrait of a Nation), as well as two children’s books (The Cuckoo and the Warbler and It’s My Egg: And You Can’t Have It.) He lives in Auckland, but seeks out the overlooked and undiscovered parts of Aotearoa, especially its forests, mountains, islands and underwater world. On expeditions, he aims to enrich guests with an understanding of the landscapes they are seeing, the wildlife they are encountering and the stories of those who have inhabited the land since ancient times.