Rebecca Macfie
Rebecca Macfie is a critically acclaimed journalist and author, and the recipient of more than 20 awards including the prestigious Wolfson Press Fellowship. Macfie has worked as a journalist since 1988. In 2007 she joined the New Zealand Listener as a writer. She has also been published with The Star, The Press, National Business Review, Independent Business Weekly, North and South, Unlimited, and the New Zealand Herald.
In 2013 she published Tragedy at Pike River Mine: How and Why 29 Men Died, a non-fiction work on the Pike River Mine Disaster that claimed 29 lives. In 2022, her biography of trade unionist Helen Kelly was published by Awa Press and long-listed for the New Zealand Book Awards general non-fiction award.
In 2024 she was appointed as the JD Stout Fellow to continue her research. Rebecca Macfie’s research focussed on the capacity of grassroots and community organisations to disrupt the harms of poverty by bringing a whānau-centred and strengths-based approach to bear on the systemic drivers of deprivation (including housing, precarious work, racism and inter-generational trauma). The Stout Fellowship allowed Rebecca to expand on an existing body of work, published in The Listener year as a series titled Hardship & Hope, which shines a light on the skill and innovation in local communities determined to remove the structural barriers to wellbeing for their tamariki.
Rebecca continues to collaborate with the Stout Research Centre, particularly contributing to and managing the past two Stout conferences that have been held, and the publications produced from the proceedings.