Laurence Fearnley is a short story writer, novelist and curator. She graduated from Victoria University of Wellington in 1997 with an MA in Creative Writing. Her short stories have been published in a range of literary journals, including Sport and Landfall, as well as several anthologies.

Fearnley’s second novel, Room, was shortlisted for the Montana New Zealand Book Awards in 2001. Her novel The Hut Builder (2010) won the 2011 New Zealand Post Book Award for Fiction. She has been awarded several fellowships, notably the 2004 Artists to Antarctica fellowship, the 2006 Island of Residencies fellowship in Tasmania, and the 2007 Robert Burns fellowship at the University of Otago.

As a curator she has written extensively on New Zealand craft artists.