PJ Marshall

I was born in England and immigrated to New Zealand at the age of ten. An early lesson in what it costs, and what it teaches, to leave one place and belong to another.

An early career with Air New Zealand took me around the world before I ever thought to write about it. I spent those years watching how people carried their histories with them: the small rituals, the things left unsaid, the way a place shapes a marriage or a family without anyone quite noticing it happen. It's the same instinct that eventually pulled me toward fiction stories with real historical weight, but told at the scale of a single household rather than an empire.

Several visits to India left me unable to look away from the period of the British Raj: its genuine achievements sitting uncomfortably alongside its cruelties, often within the same family, the same year, sometimes the same person. While researching late Victorian and Edwardian Britain and India, I found myself less interested in the official record than in what it left out. The marriages arranged for advantage, the servants and guides whose names rarely made it into anyone's ledger, the children raised between two worlds and fully at home in neither.

Of Iron and Incense is my debut novel: a story about family, duty, and the lives that get built in the space between the world we are given and the one we choose.

I now live in Auckland, New Zealand where I continue to write, research, and go looking for the stories history left out.