Ken Catran

Ken Catran is a New Zealand novelist and television screenwriter born in 1944. Before focusing on fiction he wrote extensively for New Zealand television, including the soap operas Shortland Street and Close to Home, an adaptation of Maurice Gee's Under the Mountain, and the biographical drama Hanlon, whose opening episode won the Drama Script category at the Listener Television Awards. Catran is best known among genre readers for the Deepwater trilogy, opening with Deepwater Black, in which teenagers wake to find themselves alone aboard a starship with no memory of how they got there. He has also written the Solar Colonies series and numerous other teen novels spanning science fiction, war, and historical drama, becoming one of New Zealand's most prolific writers for young readers.