Claire Mabey

Mabey, Claire (1985 - ) is a writer, editor and critic living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara and originally from Te Moana-a-Toitehuatahi. She has also lived in Ōtepoti and Tāmaki Makaurau, as well as the United Kingdom and Europe, and worked as a publisher from 2009-2012.

Claire holds a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in English Literature and Art History from Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, a teaching diploma in Speech and Drama from Trinity College London and a Diploma in Publishing from Whitireia New Zealand.

In 2014, Claire founded literary organisation Verb Wellington which creates festivals, residencies and events. The festival is described as “a big, beautiful party that celebrates books, reading, ideas, information and conversation.” Verb is based around Mabey’s centrepiece LitCrawl event, which brings together around 160 artists in over 25 public spaces around Wellington. Verb has also offered micro-residencies for writers and the Verb Wellington Residency with Katherine Mansfield House & Garden.

Claire served as Verb festival director until 2023, and is also a co-curator of the Writers programme for the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts.

In 2020 Mabey received a Ghost Light Award at the Wellington Theatre Awards, and was described in the citation as "a force of nature in the Wellington arts community".

Claire is also an essayist; in 2022 she was awarded second place in the Landfall Essay Competition, and her entry was highly commended in 2023. She writes regularly for The Spinoff and also for her own Substack.

Claire received the Creative New Zealand Louis Johnson New Writer's Bursary in 2022: the award supported her work on her first children’s novel. The resulting work, a middle grade fantasy called The Raven’s Eye Runaways, was published in 2024 by Allen & Unwin.

Hera Lindsay Bird described it as "powerfully atmospheric" and said that Mabey "pays her young readers the highest compliment by respecting their intelligence, compassion, and capacity for language."

In 2023 Claire became the Books Editor for The Spinoff, and also received a Voyager Media nomination for best reviewer.

She was awarded a Michael King Writers Centre Emerging Writers Residency in 2024, and is currently working on her next book — the second in The Raven’s Eye Runaways series. After that she is writing two books set on Wellington’s wild south coast, where she lives.