Diana Wichtel

Diana Wichtel is an award-winning journalist and author. Her family memoir, Driving to Treblinka, won the Royal Society Te Apārangi Award for General Non-fiction at the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

She was born in Vancouver to a Polish Holocaust survivor father and a Kiwi tradwife mother too busy to police her television viewing. When she was 13 her mother brought her and her two siblings home to New Zealand. She never saw her father again. Wichtel worked at the New Zealand Listener as a television critic, profile writer and feature writer from 1984 until the magazine’s brief closure in April 2020, amassing many awards and a bracing collection of hate mail. She was a columnist for the New Zealand Herald’s Canvas magazine from October 2020 to March 2024. Her 2025 Ockham Book Awards longlisted memoir of a life viewed through the lens of television, Unreel, was published in November 2024.

You can find Diana’s books at UBS – University Bookshop Canterbury.

Image: Jane Ussher