Graham Billing was a New Zealand novelist with a background in journalism and seafaring. His novel, The Slipway (1974), was described by The National Observer as ‘A work of discriminating intelligence,’ and it was published while he was a Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago in 1973. The Chambered Nautilus (1993) was described by Denis Welch as ‘Breathtaking in scope, almost biblical in depth.’ Billing died in December 2001, and his last novel, The Blue Lion, was released posthumously in 2002.