Steve Braunias

The New Zealand musician Shayne Carter described Braunias, his writing style and influences in his 2019 autobiography Dead People I Have Known: “He’s my favourite journalist in New Zealand. He’s into Brian Granville and Graham Greene, and when his columns first appeared he called people out in a way no other New Zealand journalist was doing at the time. He wrote about sitting around in the dole in old lady cafes, eating pastries and pink lamingtons and enjoying an honest pot of tea. Then he’d take out some bureaucrat for being such a loser.”

He has written for satirical television series Eating Media Lunch and The Unauthorised History of New Zealand. The $35,000 Braunias received from the 2010 CLNZ Writers' Award enabled him to work on Civilisation: 20 Places at the Edge of the World, an affectionate travel book about 20 small towns published in November 2012 by Awa Press.

Braunias has won more than 40 national awards for writing, including the 2009 Buddle Findlay Sargeson Literary fellowship, the 2010 CLL Non-Fiction Award and the 2006 Qantas Fellowship - the supreme award - at the New Zealand Qantas Media Awards (Print). He is a three-time winner of the Cathay Pacific Travel Writer of the Year Award (2002, 2010, 2011). He has won writing fellowships to the University of Oxford (Reuters, 2001), and the University of Cambridge (Wolfson College, 2006); and won awards as a sports writer, crime writer, book reviewer, food writer, and humorist.

He grew up in Mount Maunganui reading Shoot magazine, Roy of the Rovers and Tiger and Scorcher comic books. These would come to influence his later columns through the comic characters' names. He attended the Wellington Polytechnic (now Massey University) journalism course in 1980 but did not graduate.

Steven Carl Braunias (born 20 June 1960) is a New Zealand author, columnist, journalist and editor. He is the author of 10 books.