Jenni Ogden

Where I live

My husband John and I live on Great Barrier Island, a rugged, remote, off-grid island 100 kms off the north-east coast of New Zealand. It is a place our four adult children and five grandchildren love to visit. During the NZ winters we escape to the Australian tropics or travel to the US, or UK or Asia; travel being another passion, along with reading (writing!) and conservation of our natural world. 

My past and how it influenced my writing! 

I grew up in a country town in the South Island of New Zealand, in a home bursting with books and music. Armed with NZ and Australian university degrees in Zoology and Psychology—including a PhD in Neuropsychology—and now with four children, John and I moved to Boston, where I took up a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and worked with H.M., the most famous amnesiac in history. Returning to Auckland University, I became the Director of the Clinical Psychology program, and over the next twenty-two years immersed myself in teaching, clinical practice and research in clinical neuropsychology, as well as traveling extensively and enjoying research fellowships at Oxford University and the Australian National University. In July, 2015, the International Neuropsychological Society recognized my work with a Distinguished Career Award. Writing over 60 scientific journal articles and serving on a number of editorial boards taught me how to ‘tell, not show.’ However, my non-fiction books, Fractured Minds: A Case-Study Approach to Clinical Neuropsychology (OUP, New York, 1996, 2005), and Trouble In Mind: Stories from a Neuropsychologist’s Casebook (OUP, New York, 2012) featuring the moving stories of patients with a wide range of common and rare neuropsychological disorders, gave me practice in ‘showing’ as well as ‘telling,’ and a taste of the pleasures I hoped to indulge in as a novelist some day when I had time. That day came in 2008, and since then we have lived off-grid on a remote island off the coast of NZ, with winters spent traveling and keeping warm at our favourite place, tropical Far North Queensland, or somewhere else warm. My novels, not surprisingly, usually have psychological and medical subthemes, and my settings draw on my love of exotic and far-flung locations, frequently remote islands! When I’m not writing or traveling, I can be found on the beach—always with a book—or spending time with my family, now expanded to include five grandchildren.

You can listen/watch interviews with me on my writing and books under 'INTERVIEWS' and do please sign up for my occasional NEWSLETTER so I can keep in touch about the small and funny things in life, reviews of  books I love, and occasionally an update on a new book of my own.

My books 

All my novels are published in e-book, paperback and Audiobook formats and they are all, at heart, about finding a family and a place to call home. 

 My debut NOVEL , A Drop In The Ocean, was published in May 2016, by She Writes Press and later by Sea Dragon Press and has won multiple awards and sold over 90,000 copies. It is a story about love, sea turtles and an unthinkable choice. Of course it draws a little on some of my own experiences, as a turtle tagger—in my youth—on a tropical island on the Great Barrier Reef, and also on the medical (and neurological) issues that become increasingly common as mid-life creeps up on us. Women (40+) who love stories about relationships and mid-life transformation will enjoy it, especially women who appreciate novels that delve into deeper issues—issues that lead us to questions about the sacrifices we must sometimes make if we truly love someone; the hard lesson that love is about letting go. The sort of book that readers' groups like to read and discuss.

The Moon is Missing, a 'domestic suspense' published in August, 2020, is set in London, New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and Great Barrier Island, NZ! It features a woman neurosurgeon who finds the courage to travel to New Orleans to solve a family mystery for her teenage daughter's sake and arrives there at the same time as Hurricane Katrina and volunteers to help out at the Memorial Hospital. Katrina was twenty years ago but New Orleans has still not recovered and Memorial Hospital was one of the most horrific of all the horrific stories. The novel has been praised for its accurate depiction of what happened there. (The novel has a happy ending!) 

Call My Name is a family saga set in Far North Tropical Queensland and is a story of friendship, good marital and family relationships that have to overcome terrible tragedies, and how they are made stronger by this. 'Secretely' I think it is my favourite of all my novels so far. 

Dancing with Dragons, like A Drop in the Ocean has a strong marine conservation theme but the protagonist is an 18-year-old dancer who loses everything but finds a new family in her friendship with an 11-year-old Aboriginal boy with whom she shares her passion to save the stunning seahorses that live on the coral reef. It has won seven awards, including best cover for General Fiction. Bookclub readers form ages 13 to 90 seem to love it! 

 My NON-FICTION books take their inspiration from my career as a neuropsychologist, and are written for the general reader with an interest in case studies of people who suffer from neurological disorders, as well as professionals in the field. Best-selling novelist, Ann Hood kindly wrote "Like Oliver Sacks in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Jenni Ogden creates characters who come to life like those in our favorite fiction, and shares with us the fascinating peculiarities of their brains."