Spiro Zavos, a first generation Greek New Zealander, played first class cricket and gained a MA in History (with a Dip. Ed.) at Victoria University of Wellington, later studying in the United States, where he gained a Master of Arts in Educational Administration at the Catholic University of America. He received the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship in 1978 which enabled him to spend a year in Menton, France. He has been a teacher and a press officer at New Zealand House in London, and also worked as a feature and editorial writer for The Dominion (Wellington). Subsequently he worked as a journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald, having previously worked as a political columnist for Zealander, the Sunday News, the Sunday Times and the National Business Review. He is also a writer of social commentary, with articles in the Pacific Island Monthly and books such as Social Credit's Rise to Power (INL Print, Wellington, 1981) and After the Final Whistle (Fourth Estate, Wellington, 1979), which was a series of essays on different aspects of rugby. He has since gone on to write several acclaimed books on sport (mainly rugby union), which earned him recognition as one of the world's most influential rugby writers. His short stories have appeared in the Listener, Landfall and Mate and in anthologies.
